NEWS ANALYSIS : Riordan’s Personal Efforts Warm the Business Climate : Economy: But many say the mayor needs a broader vision. He is expected to outline goals in a speech today.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan didn’t like what he read a year ago in Fortune magazine: a report that a Venice-based ceramics firm was prepared to bolt the city because its expansion plans were being stymied by red tape and high costs.

So Riordan did what he loves best. He got on the phone and asked to talk to the boss at the Feltman-Langer Co. Within months, the mayor’s office guided the company through a maze of city agencies and toward several government loans. Now the 65-employee company that specializes in coffee cups will move, not to Mexico or Asia, but to a factory in Watts.

Such personal intervention has been the hallmark of Riordan’s economic program since he took office 15 months ago--warming the collective heart, if not the mind, of much of the business community. But many business people say the mayor still needs a broader vision--and systemic improvements in the city’s bureaucracy and tax structure--that will help lead Los Angeles out of its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Riordan plans to tackle that larger mission beginning today, when he will deliver what his office is calling a “major address” on “Investing in the Future of Los Angeles.”

What Riordan is expected to offer today, more than anything, is continuing goodwill toward business and a summary of his achievements so far. He will also talk about a 19-member team dedicated to attracting and retaining business, the impending release of proposals to make it less onerous to undertake construction, and a one-stop loan guarantee office. Tax breaks and other economic incentives are, at best, on the more distant horizon.

Republican Riordan is also likely to take a page from his party’s manual and assert government’s limited influence on economic growth. In the past, he has warned of “magic bullets” and grandiose plans, saying: “I’m not a bull artist.”

In his first year, Riordan concentrated on balancing the city’s budget and finding money to expand the Police Department. He reasoned that the creation of a safer city is the single best economic development action he can take.

The businessman-turned-mayor also played to his natural strength--talking person to person with entrepreneurs.

“Riordan, bless his heart, he had the chutzpah to call up and say, ‘I don’t want you to leave Los Angeles, I want you to stay in L.A.,’ ” said Jan Belson, Feltman-Langer’s owner. “That kind of bowled me over.”

In his second year, the mayor’s aides concede that they must move beyond what one business consultant called Riordan’s “random acts of goodness.”

Nonetheless, his willingness to talk and to seek out the business community seems to have put him in good favor. Even Joe Sanchez Jr., a prominent supporter of Riordan election opponent Mike Woo and owner of a wholesale grocery business, said he has developed a reluctant admiration for the mayor.

“I have been pleasantly surprised,” Sanchez said. “I sort of like what he’s saying and . . . I think the guy is really trying.”

Many observers suggested that Riordan could have done more if not for the Jan. 17 earthquake, which absorbed money and energy that might otherwise have gone to economic development. Others said Riordan stumbled out of the blocks when he appointed Al Villalobos, his first deputy mayor for economic development. Villalobos resigned last year after The Times published stories detailing allegations of a checkered business career.

Economist Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow with the Center for the New West, a public policy think tank, said he believes Riordan’s greatest success has been in lifting the spirits of the city.

“There’s at least a sense that City Hall is interested in talking to business and that he is accessible,” Kotkin said. And yet, “I’m not sure that the results have been spectacular. . . . In terms of substantive changes, I don’t think there have been all that many.”

Many in Los Angeles feel their future success is closely aligned with Riordan’s. And they are loath to criticize him. “Nobody wants to attack him because he is the best we have,” said one business consultant, who asked not to be identified.

But most business people don’t doubt that Riordan is trying.

When Coast Federal Savings Bank threatened to take more than 700 employees from its San Fernando Valley headquarters and go elsewhere, for example, Riordan and his aides arranged for the bank to move to the former Hughes Aircraft research facility in Chatsworth. The deal still must be finalized.

The mayor also helped talk California Fashion Industries, maker of the Carole Little women’s clothing line, into undertaking a $10-million expansion of its Downtown factory instead of moving to Nevada. He also helped push ahead long-stalled plans for a Food 4 Less supermarket at Adams Boulevard and Vermont Avenue that will employ about 150 people.

“If it had not been for the intervention of the mayor’s office and Councilman (Hal) Bernson’s office, Coast Federal would have left Los Angeles,” said Downtown lawyer-lobbyist George Mihlsten, who represented the institution. “I think the business retention and attraction strategy is working.”

But there have been losses too.

An intensive lobbying effort by Riordan was not enough to keep computer maker Packard Bell and its 1,500 employees in Chatsworth, especially after the January earthquake devastated the company’s plant. Citing an “unacceptable earthquake risk for (a) sole U.S. manufacturing location,” the company announced last month that it would leave Southern California, perhaps for Sacramento.

Thrifty Corp. also announced that it would move its headquarters after a well-publicized dispute with the mayor’s office. Riordan said he gave up on the case when he learned that Thrifty was intent on moving to Oregon to complete a merger with the larger PayLess drugstore chain that is based there. But Thrifty principal Leonard Green said Riordan had made little effort to keep Thrifty in Los Angeles.

The next great battle on the business promotion front: Bloomingdale’s. The upscale department store is currently weighing whether to open its first West Coast outlet in Beverly Hills or Century City, within the Los Angeles city limits. Bloomingdale’s Chairman Michael Gould said a meeting with Riordan convinced him that the city will do “whatever it takes” to land the store, but Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area, is already decrying the traffic problems it would bring.

The mayor’s office claims a host of other victories on more global issues that confront business.

* In September, Riordan succeeded in removing from a regional clean-air plan stringent anti-smog measures for airplanes, trucks, trains and ships.

* In a major move to improve the area’s infrastructure, Riordan’s staff helped negotiate the long-delayed purchase of railroad right of ways to construct a high-speed train link between the Port of Los Angeles and Downtown.

* In a nod to one of the city’s top industries, Riordan has appointed a deputy for entertainment affairs, who has already simplified permit procedures for location filming and cut the number of fire inspectors required on most film sets.

* His office also helped arrange for a foreign trade zone near the port, where businesses can defer or avoid duties on imports and exports.

Riordan has also not been shy about soliciting federal aid for the city. The mayor prides himself on his ties with the Clinton Administration and recently announced that more than $2 million in federal transit money is projected to go for improvements along eight major transportation corridors in the city.

Some of Riordan’s efforts to make fundamental changes in the city bureaucracy have been less successful.

He attempted to remove a 7 1/2% surcharge on business licenses this summer, but the City Council agreed only to cut it in half--leaving Los Angeles’ business licenses the most costly in the area. An effort to consolidate the city’s economic development efforts from four departments into one was also rejected by the council. And plans for turning some city services over to private firms--a Riordan campaign mantra--have been pushed firmly onto the back burner by city employee unions.

This summer, the mayor’s hand-picked Committee on Fiscal Administration said Riordan and the council had not completed nearly enough of its program for firming up the city’s finances. The group’s chairman, Michael E. Tennenbaum of the Bear, Stearns & Co. stock brokerage, compared the city’s finances to a “kindergarten PTA” and said the city’s elected leaders had “failed.” Tennenbaum said the city can’t get its finances in order until it reduces contributions to city pension systems and improves bill collections, among other reforms.

But even the mayor’s efforts to play the tough businessman in his municipal domain can cut both ways in the business community.

Riordan won a major victory last year when his Airport Commission was able to triple landing fees for airlines at LAX--a boon to the airport treasury but a blow to relations with the airline industry, which has suffered major losses in recent years. And the mayor’s attempts to take more money out of the Port of Los Angeles for police and other programs has shipping companies worried that their dockage fees could go up. That could drive them to other West Coast ports and cripple one of the city’s most powerful economic engines, the shippers warn.

One of the mayor’s aides bemoaned the lack of tools available to lure and retain businesses. So far, officials can promise to cut through bureaucratic red tape and to connect entrepreneurs with myriad of state and federally backed loan programs.

That has been enough for some like Belson, the coffee cup maker from Venice.

But the mayor’s office hopes to soon commission a study that will prove its contention that the city’s business license taxes and other charges--in particular a fee for using the city sewers--are out of line with neighboring cities. Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley reported earlier this year, for example, that a manufacturer that would pay $118,000 in business taxes in Los Angeles, would be charged just $1,200 in Burbank.

Further proof of such a disparity might be used to fuel a City Charter amendment that would allow the mayor and City Council to approve business tax reductions to spur economic growth, mayoral aides said.