COLUMN ONE : Yaroslavsky Turns a New Page : The savvy L.A. councilman has evolved with the city over the course of 19 years. Today he joins the county Board of Supervisors much as he joined the council--as a reformer.

Zev Yaroslavsky stands amid the packing boxes and the political trophies, preparing to leave behind Los Angeles City Hall--the setting over the past 19 years for his transformation from shaggy-haired political upstart to consummate political insider.

Yaroslavsky, 45, is embarking on a short but important journey--for himself and for the world of local politics. The councilman’s trip up the hill to take a seat today on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors--a powerful but often insulated and sluggish body that Yaroslavsky aims to shake up--means saying goodby to the institution where he earned fame, influence and access.

Crammed into the packing boxes are photos of Yaroslavsky with President Clinton, Yaroslavsky with ex-LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates, Yaroslavsky with two prime ministers of Israel, Yaroslavsky with the Queen of England, Yaroslavsky with Pope John Paul II.

“Who would have ever thought that a 26-year-old kid, three years out of college, would have had the opportunity to play as large a role as I have in running the second largest city in the United States?” Yaroslavsky muses.

Armed with savvy, ambition and the solid support of the Jewish community that elected him, Yaroslavsky was more often than not a dominant player in virtually every municipal initiative of note since he joined the City Council in 1975.

His evolution in many ways has mirrored the city’s own.

In his early days at City Hall, a black liberal mayor backed by a powerful black-Jewish political alliance was itching to take on the Police Department--a deeply conservative institution with a powerful political machine of its own. Yaroslavsky, fresh from his days as a student activist at UCLA, joined the forces pushing for change in the LAPD and made a name for himself as someone not afraid to tangle with then-chief Gates.

Later, as rampant development emerged during the high-flying 1980s, Yaroslavsky made that his issue, ultimately co-sponsoring a successful ballot initiative to curb development citywide. His reputation grew--although some pointedly noted that big developers were among his largest contributors.

Despite Yaroslavsky’s considerable ambition, the mayor’s office eluded him. He seriously considered running against Tom Bradley in 1989 but decided against it. Four years later, after the municipal landscape had been transfigured by the riots and by Gates’ departure and Bradley’s impending retirement, Yaroslavsky again declined a chance to try for the top job.

Instead, it went to Richard Riordan, a Republican venture capitalist who won on the slogan “Tough Enough to Turn L.A. Around.”

By then, the maturing Yaroslavsky, sensing the power of the purse, had reinvented himself as the council’s budget czar--a key position as the economy went bad, and hard-nosed pragmatism became a prized municipal virtue. Now the insider, he inveighed against term limits and laid the groundwork for establishing a family political dynasty by backing another Yaroslavsky, his wife, Barbara, to take over his City Council seat.

As he moves to the Board of Supervisors today, Yaroslavsky enters a new incarnation--assuming again the mantle of a reformer, vowing to take on a massive and entrenched bureaucracy and open its secretive practices to greater public oversight.

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Zev Yaroslavsky’s political artistry--one part media mastery, one part fund-raising prowess, one part instinct for shifting realities--has been widely recognized.

At Yaroslavsky’s going-away party, Mayor Riordan gave him a copy of that classic treatise on the dark art of politics, Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” Everyone laughed. “It was like carrying coals to Newcastle,” quipped one City Hall aide.

Yaroslavsky could be found in the City Hall pressroom more often than any other public official, sometimes trying out comments on a topical municipal issue in a blatant attempt to get quoted in a news story.

And it worked. A computer review found that Yaroslavsky’s name appeared in almost 3,500 separate articles published in The Times over the past ten years. By contrast, John Ferraro, the council’s president during most of that same period, was mentioned in 2,200 articles.

“He is the master of the sound bite,” Ferraro said. “If he went to your news conference, before long he’d make it his news conference.”

Yaroslavsky’s gift for raising campaign money was helped by the fact that his district was a hot spot of development during the 1980s and that his constituents are some of the city’s most affluent residents.

He also brought a certain dedication to the task. He would attend a fund-raiser for another politician and quickly begin working the contributors’ tables.

His passion for politics--and for sensing which way the wind was blowing--sometimes took on an air of low comedy. On at least one Election Day, Yaroslavsky accompanied his staffers as they rummaged through trash bins at polling places to retrieve the discarded sample ballots of voters who had marked the booklets to guide them in voting. From the marked sample ballots, Yaroslavsky had his own exit poll.

“Can you imagine anyone doing this just to get an idea of the results only a few hours earlier?” said one City Hall aide.

Sometimes his passion for winning the political game got him into trouble. Earlier this year, the councilman was discovered tearing down a street-side campaign sign of his main opponent in the supervisor’s race. The incident proved a wholly unnecessary embarrassment given the fact that Yaroslavsky was a shoo-in in the race.

Usually, Yaroslavsky’s moves are far subtler. Even opponents have admired his keen sense of political timing.

After being elected to the Board of Supervisors in June from a district with a much larger San Fernando Valley base than his council district, Yaroslavsky surprised some when he told an interviewer how much he admired the curmudgeonly ex-Councilman Ernani Bernardi--a beloved political fixture in the Valley, although in some ways Yaroslavsky’s antithesis.

“My jaw dropped to the floor when I read it,” said a former colleague. Pure calculation, speculated another City Hall veteran, designed to smooth Yaroslavsky’s way politically as he prepared to represent a constituency where Bernardi was popular.

Some say Yaroslavsky’s style transformed the chairmanship of the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee into a powerful and highly coveted post.

“It’s a function of personality as much as position,” noted Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas.

A strong personality who placed himself at the center of big municipal issues, Yaroslavsky has not been without critics and foes.

Bradley, who butted heads with Yaroslavsky during the 1980s, declined to return phone calls seeking comment.

Ex-chief Gates labeled Yaroslavsky “nothing but a politician--who played to the masses.”

Another high-ranking City Hall veteran said: “He could demagogue with the best of them, and he could play righteous indignation better than most.”

“If you were working with him, he was a powerful ally. If against him, he was a formidable foe,” said Councilman Joel Wachs, a onetime adversary who nevertheless admires Yaroslavsky’s talents.

The son of immigrants, Yaroslavsky spent his early years in Boyle Heights. His mother died when he was 10. His parents taught him to give back to the community, he said, explaining his entry into public life. Others think it may have grown out of a large appetite for attention, a need to feel important and rub shoulders with the rich and famous while influencing the course of events.

“They’re all like that, but Zev’s appetite was bigger,” said one of the city’s top officials.

Yaroslavsky’s own assessment as he leaves City Hall: “I don’t want to sound vainglorious, but no moss has grown on my rear-end here. For better or worse, I made things happen.”

His involvement took him overseas. He relished his official trips to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where history was in the making as countries there emerged from decades of Communist rule. He rolled up his sleeves, acting as an election observer in Romania and as an adviser to newly elected city officials in Russia and the Ukraine.

In the same vein, Yaroslavsky clearly enjoyed the access to legendary figures that his post afforded him.

Although council members were regularly invited to the famous birthday parties of late industrialist Armand Hammer, Yaroslavsky was “disinvited” for years as he led the fight against Occidental Oil’s plans to drill in Pacific Palisades. Later, when Hammer asked for Yaroslavsky’s help in winning approvals for his Westwood museum, Yaroslavsky used the occasion to work his way back onto the guest list. He chuckles as he recalls finagling a lunch with former Nixon aide Bob Haldeman to talk about the Watergate years. (The date was made as Haldeman sought Yaroslavsky’s backing for a zoning variance in Westwood for a client.)

For all his sharp instincts, some say, Yaroslavsky sometimes missed the mark at City Hall.

“Sometimes his economic views did not square well with a business agenda,” said Ray Remy, executive director of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, citing Yaroslavsky’s anti-development actions and his support for taxes that fall heavily on businesses.

“He just didn’t get it--that there’s been a fundamental shift and that Los Angeles is no longer a competitive urban market,” said a prominent lobbyist for business interests. “But it’s due in part to the fact that Zev’s never been in business.”

Cal State Fullerton political science professor Raphael Sonenshein, a student of Los Angeles politics, said that Yaroslavsky, while thoughtful on the issue of the historic liberal alliances between blacks and Jews, never actually built a solid bridge to the black community himself.

Others fault Yaroslavsky for not living up to his early billing as a reformer and champion of the underdog. “I haven’t seen the reformer,” said Ridley-Thomas, who represents South-Central Los Angeles.

To Ridley-Thomas, that was apparent when Yaroslavsky fought a plan to shift city housing funds to the central city, at the expense of Yaroslavsky’s white, middle-class constituency.

“Unfortunately, he put his not inconsiderable talents to bad use . . . to divide the city and strain relations between communities,” Ridley-Thomas said of the housing funds fight--which Yaroslavsky won.

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To win his first City Council election in 1975, Yaroslavsky--a Hebrew schoolteacher and leader of a Soviet Jewry group--had to beat Fran Savitch, a member of Mayor Bradley’s inner circle and the favorite of the affluent-liberal Jewish community.

But Yaroslavsky walked precincts and endeared himself to the older, middle-class Jewish residents of the Fairfax district--many of them recent immigrants--and scored an upset.

Before long, Yaroslavsky was embroiled in several popular crusades of the day that, in retrospect, show how Los Angeles and Yaroslavsky have changed over nearly two decades. Those fights included his support for killing a plan to put a diamond lane for car-pooling commuters on the Santa Monica Freeway and his opposition to an unpopular and hugely costly federal program to require the city of Los Angeles to stop dumping sewage sludge in Santa Monica Bay.

But it was on the police issue that he made his strongest mark.

A product of 1960s campus skepticism about law enforcement, Yaroslavsky tangled with the LAPD over police spying on dissident groups, including his own Southern California Council on Soviet Jews.

Later, Yaroslavsky championed a plan to end the use of the chokehold by police amid growing evidence that the restraint was being used to deadly effect mostly against blacks. The chokehold controversy in some ways foreshadowed the city’s painful encounter with police brutality after the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King was televised around the world.

Yaroslavsky began to see himself as mayoral material. He started building a massive campaign war chest, hoping that Bradley would be elected California’s governor.

But after Bradley failed in races for governor in 1982 and 1986, Yaroslavsky prepared to challenge him head-on.

Yaroslavsky tapped into the powerful quality-of-life fears of the city’s middle-class homeowners, who felt that their neighborhoods were imperiled by the traffic and aesthetic incursions of the 1980s commercial building boom.

The councilman drew on credentials he established in 1986, when he and Councilman Marvin Braude unveiled Proposition U, a bold measure to trim development citywide that handily won in the face of tepid opposition from Bradley and the city’s business and labor interests.

But in the summer of 1988, a memo to Yaroslavsky from Michael Berman, his political adviser in the mayor’s race, was leaked to The Times. The memo’s observations--that Bradley was not bright and that Yaroslavsky should lean heavily on his wealthy Jewish connections--caused an uproar about the dangers of ethnic stereotyping.

The outcry forced Yaroslavsky to dismiss Berman, leaving his fledgling campaign without a guide.

Then Bradley turned the anti-development tables on Yaroslavsky, whom neighborhood groups thought was too soft on a plan to expand the Westside Pavilion. Bradley stepped in and blocked part of the project. The move signaled that the mayor--with the support of homeowner activists--was ready to aggressively challenge Yaroslavsky’s anti-growth credentials.

By January, 1989, Yaroslavsky had decided--after seeing a poll that showed Bradley’s popularity was remaining constant--to abort his run for the mayor’s office.

It was a low-water mark. Yaroslavsky still had substantial power as chairman of the budget committee, but during the tough economic times that started in the late 1980s, the city’s budget-making process has involved a constant, joyless tightening of the screws.

People remarked that Yaroslavsky seemed frustrated and bored. Yet in 1993 Yaroslavsky again decided not to run for mayor. Some say it was a failure of confidence.

He toyed with the idea of taking on Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman, privately boasting that he thought he could beat him.

But in the end he was spared such a clash and given an opportunity to escape the confines of City Hall when Edelman unexpectedly decided to retire.

Council President Ferraro was with Yaroslavsky in Tokyo when they got the news. They had planned to fly back to Los Angeles in two days, but Yaroslavsky--anxious about losing even a moment’s opportunity--got on the next available plane.

Ferraro savored the memory: “I think he would have swum back if he hadn’t got that earlier flight.”

* EDELMAN RETIRES: The supervisor leaves a legacy of civility, quiet good works. B1