The Mayor’s Midterm Exam : How Far Has Richard Riordan Moved the City Since he Became Mayor? An Evaluation of L.A. Inc. After Two Years.

If you’re looking for the stuff of instant political symbolism, those 250 Styrofoam containers are a good place to start.

Brimming with scrambled eggs, bacon, potatoes and biscuits, they were delivered to City Hall’s underground emergency operations center three hours after the Northridge earthquake struck on Jan. 17, 1994. The hungry workers’ benefactor? Richard Riordan, the city’s multimillionaire new mayor, who ordered up breakfast from the Original Pantry Cafe, the Downtown landmark restaurant that he bought to save it from the wrecking ball.

“I was struck by how different that was from when we had the riots,” says then-Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. When the city had erupted nearly two years earlier, toward the end of Tom Bradley’s 20-year tenure in L.A.’s top political job, there were no promptly dispatched meals from anywhere. “There was a meeting to try to decide how to feed our employees. The troops were getting hungry, and we were having a meeting about it,” recalls Yaroslavsky, now a county supervisor.

Sure, Riordan delivered breakfast. But making a speedy delivery on his campaign promises is another matter. “I came in thinking I could make tremendous changes immediately. It didn’t happen that way,” he says now as he nears the midpoint of his tenure and prepares to run again.

Yet there are signs that the businessman/lawyer-turned-mayor has gone beyond the can-do clich’8e of the Styrofoam containers and is actually making good on two key goals he set for himself on the 1993 campaign trail: a safer city and an efficient, accountable municipal government.

Even Riordan’s critics grant him this: Two years out, the LAPD has grown by about 500 officers, crime is down and the nonprofit alliance he created has raised millions to bring the department into the computer age. He got the City Council to authorize mone y for more overtime pay for police and to turn over some desk jobs to civilian employees so officers could spend more time on the beat. There are new patrol cars for the first time in years. Nationwide, crime dropped 3% last year; it was down 12.7% in Los Angeles.

Helping the police is politically popular. But changing the City Hall culture--grown sluggish in the later years of Bradley’s Administration--is downright revolutionary. Riordan is driving toward a customer-friendly, highly efficient operation, an L.A. Inc. that will deliver more services for less money through a corporate-style system of accountability. He’s got department heads churning out written goals that will help determine whether they get raises--or the sack.

Having recast Los Angeles as a corporation, Riordan is now more than ever its CEO. Although he took office constrained by the “weak mayor” system dictated by the City Charter, all of a sudden he’s carrying a big stick. Voters in April handed Riordan broad new powers to hire and fire general managers. The city’s electorate had said no four times before, but with Riordan leading--and raising big bucks for--the campaign, the measure sailed through with 62% of the vote.

Riordan may be able to cite some significant accomplishments. But the downside is that he’s achieved many of them using a boardroom--perhaps even back-room--style that has fueled fears of conflict of interest. He’s been accused of excluding African Americans from his inner circle and of indifference to black concerns.

Those fears have grown as Willie L. Williams, the city’s first black police chief, has locked into an escalating battle with police commissioners and the man who appointed them--Riordan. Those close to Williams say the chi ef believes the mayor is behind his problems with the commission, which has criticized the chief’s management of the department and reprimanded him for allegedly lying about receiving free Las Vegas hotel accomodations.

While the drama playing out over Williams consumes the city’s attention now, Riordan’s legacy--as well as his reelection prospects--are likely to hinge on how well he does in improving the local economic climate. After all, should the city expect anything less of the rich and successful businessman it elected two years ago to “Turn L.A. Around” ?

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It is ironic that the administration, headed by a man who made his fortune as a venture capitalist, has taken so long to get an economic recovery program up and running. “It’s surprising to me that this is where he would screw it up, “ says Joel Kotkin, a business and cultural analyst and International Fellow at Pepperdine University who calls himself a “great Riordan admirer.” “The intent is certainly pro-business, and there have been some good initiatives that in the long run will help, but things are taking too long and there are companies that need help and attention now.” Kotkin also says the Riordan team has been trying too hard to get money out of Washington.

It was in dealing with the federal government that the Administration suffered perhaps its most embarrassing setback: failing to win a slot in a federal empowerment zone program inspired by the L.A. riots. The designation would have pumped as much as $600 million a year into poverty-ravaged neighborhoods, but L.A.’s application was criticized as fuzzy and unfocused, its officials as overconfident and complacent. So sharp was his disappointment that Riordan--who contended that the guidelines had been rigged to favor East Coast cities--snubbed a phone call from President Clinton intended to put the best face on a consolation package of aid.

As Citizen Riordan and his staff of mostly City Hall outsiders tried to learn the ropes, there were other missteps as well, including an ill-fated plan to raise money by selling the historic Central Library Downtown to a subsidiary of Philip Morris, then leasing it back. Riordan’s efforts to disband the Board of Public Works flopped last year, and, in the face of City Council and employee union objections, he’s no longer talking much about turning large segments of city services over to private contractors. Airline opposition and federal regulations have stymied for now his plan to sell off LAX, but he says he has not given up.

There have also been questions about whether Riordan will be able to keep his promise to increase the size of the police force by 2,855 by the summer of 1998. Already, he’s hedging a bit. When he unveiled his ambitious Project Safety Los Angeles plan early in his Administration, “I didn’t anticipate the attrition,” Riordan says, referring to the higher-than-usual exodus out of the department in recent years. While the mayor says he still hopes to get enough bodies, more often than not these days, he’s talking about a more efficient use of the bodies he has. “I’ve learned that what’s important is how many hours you get of police out on the streets, and we’ve done that by getting them off desks, paying overtime, giving them computers.”

Even Riordan and his allies concede that he’s still in his apprenticeship. “He’s learned real quick,” says City Councilman Richard Alatorre, a 22-year veteran of state and local elected offices and perhaps the mayor ‘s closest council ally, “but he’s still a neophyte in this process. He’s impatient, and he wants to do everything. Lots of times I’ve had to tell him, ‘You’re nuts, man!’because what he’s wanted to do is stupid from a political point of view.”

Alatorre doesn’t mean that as an insult. Quite the contrary. “He’s a shrewd businessman who has a different approach. We need that right now. The conventional ways of doing things are not working.”

His friends describe Riordan as a quick study, and there are signs of an increasing political sure-footedness. After the stunning loss of the empowerment-zone designation , Riordan quickly began heavy-duty negotiations with the feds that increased the size of the consolation prize by $180 million. Now, armed with $430 million in federal grants and loan guarantees, the city is about to open an ambitious Community Development Bank aimed at boosting the economies of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. When combined with the resources promised by several private financial institutions, the bank could do far more lasting good than the empowerment zone designation, Riordan insists. (Some remain unconvinced. “It will be less money, despite what others might say,” says Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Riordan critic who has pointedly questioned the mayor’s commitment to the black community.)

He’s also learned to pick his battles more carefully. In last year’s budget, he proposed complicated and politically unpalatable moves such as the consolidation of some departments and contracting out jobs now traditionally performed by city workers. This year, Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley--the bright , dedicated but sometimes-abrasive prot’8eg’8e from the mayor’s law firm--consulted with department heads and council members before putting together the proposed spending package. The document saved for another time a lot of the things that got last year’s budget into trouble with the council.

Other successes have been his private fund-raising drive, the Mayor’s Alliance for a Safer Los Angeles, which is on the way to bringing in $15 million for timesaving computers for police stations and patrol cars, and the deal to procure a second training academy, which opened this year in Westchester.

Riordan can still seem uncomfortable with the demands of democracy and the cumbersome give-and-take it requires. He prefers to call on people he admires in business, philanthropic and professional circles and appointing them to unpaid task forces to study city finances, raise money for Police Department computers and suggest ways to fix the city’s convoluted building-permit system.

Getting gratis help from the private sector h as saved taxpayers a bundle (Riordan himself works for $1 a year), but it also has bred complaints that those outside his circle or with differing views are not welcome. Some even say he is fostering a return to the day when a handful of elites ran the show.

Much of what the mayor does takes place out of the public eye--and outside the usual power channels that for decades have dictated how things are done at City Hall. Impatient with the inherently messy political process, Riordan likes to work out solutions behind the scenes, over the phone or in private meetings. “He doesn’t mean it to be seamy, he means it to be quick,” says one City Council member, “but it’s worrisome that it’s not done in public.”

Others have complained that Riordan’s strong reliance on handpicked advisers invites conflicts of interest and corruption, even with the purest of intentions. Xandra Kayden, who teaches at UCLA’s School of Public Policy, has angered the Administration by writing in The Times’opinion pages about the dangers inherent in relying too heavily on the private sector to do the public’s business. “I trust him, but I’m worried about the people two or three circles out,” says Kayden.

Riordan thinks that it’s foolish to overlook people’s expertise and volunteer spirit simply because some of them eventually may stand to profit from a city connection. “There’s a zillion reasons why people might expect city business. But I think you look at the job people have done, to say we’re going to stop using these experts because we’re worried about that, you’ll get nowhere, you do nothing. “

“Judge me by performance,” says Riordan. “If you think I’m playing favorites, then judge me by that, but for God’s sake, don’t stifle the system!”

Bill McCarley, the veteran City Hall bureaucrat who served as Riordan’s chief of staff before the mayor dispatched him last year to pare down the massive Department of Water and Power, sees a refreshing reversal of the usual political patronage. “Traditionally, people think of politicians as those who take care of their friends. Riordan brings them in, but he puts the touch on them.”

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Riordan’s behind-the-scenes style has made much of what he does subject to dual interpretation, to speculation about where he’s really coming from.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in L.A.’s African American community, which lost a powerful figure in the mayor’s office when Bradley stepped down after two decades there and is grappling with a nationwide conservative backlash that some see as a threat to years of hard-won gain s and respect. Enter Riordan, a wealthy white Republican whose first election bid lands him in L.A.’s top political job, after a campaign that some said just went through the motions of courting the city’s black voters. He drew his strongest support from w hite conservatives in the San Fernando Valley while making a respectable showing among Latinos and Asians. Blacks were the only group to vote resoundingly against him in his showdown with then-Councilman Michael Woo.

Today, as Riordan enjoys generally amiable relations with the city’s other ethnic groups, his staunchest critics are blacks. “His overtures and relations with the African American community have been limited and strained,” says Ridley-Thomas. “What we have is a mayor who has more capacity to be a cheerleader than a leader. Certainly there’s no bigger booster for L.A. than Dick Riordan. But we need someone who can articulate a vision for the city beyond sloganeering and can inspire people. That’s where he falls short.”

Ridley-Thomas and Councilwoman Rita Walters, an African American whose 9th District reaches south from Downtown into some of the city’poorest neighborhoods, joined more than 125 black political, religious and community leaders at a strategy meeting one spring Saturday--a gathering t hat served to pump up the volume on a litany of concerns and perceived slights. There were complaints about the scarcity of Riordan advisers and commissioners who are well known in the black community. There was anger over his refusal to remove a civil ser vice commissioner who is leading a campaign to end California’s affirmative action programs. And there was alarm over indications that Riordan was unhappy with two of the highest-ranking blacks on the local scene, Metropolitan Transit Authority Chief Executive Officer Franklin E. White and LAPD Chief Williams.

Some think it’s an issue of respect. When he presided over a public hearing on the community development bank at Manual Arts High School one evening in February, Riordan lost his temper when the audience gave him static at adjournment time--it was mostly blacks who were left waiting to speak. “This is a sham!” cried out a smartly suited black businesswoman. The mayor, reddening, banged his gavel hard and left the stage. “I was appalled at the contemptuo us nature of the mayor and his staff relative to the needs of the community,” says Mike Neely, director of an outreach program for the homeless.

Another gaffe came about six months into Riordan’s term. The mayor, touring South-Central Los Angeles in a van with Ridley-Thomas, the councilman’s female chief of staff and a couple of mayoral aides, repeated an old Richard Pryor joke that referred to the size of a black man’s penis. Word got out. Ridley-Thomas publicly denounced the mayor’s telling the joke as “politically unacceptable for someone in his position,” and the mayor apologized.

Even when he performs an indisputably kind act, he draws criticism. Walters remembers the opening of the Century Freeway in October, 1993. While the mayor was chatting with his favorite constituents--kids--at El Santo Ni’96 o, a Catholic Charities center at 23rd and Trinity, Walters heard Riordan enthusiastically invite the youngsters to bring their bikes down to the freeway and join him on a celebratory ride to mark its opening. “Mr. Mayor,” Walters says she informed Riordan, “these children don’t have bikes. Their families can’t afford them.” Riordan promised to get them some. Riding back to City Hall in his red Ford Explorer, he got on the car phone and went right to work. He procu red a donation of 26 rebuilt bikes, helmets and a training course for the center, reaching into his own wallet when he discovered that a few more bikes were needed.

“He did come through,” acknowledges Walters. But she adds that the mayor’s charitable contributions--including donations of computers to scores of inner-city schools over the last several years--aren’t enough. “I wish he understood the necessity for being sensitive beyond just giving things or money. He can’t just bring a noblesse oblige attitude and expect it to work.”

Riordan is exasperated by that response. “Let no good deed go unpunished,” he sighs.

Raphael J. Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political science professor and author of a book about the intricacies of racial politics in Los Angeles, does not see the Administration as hostile to blacks but says its paucity of black influence is undermini ng its effectiveness. “Riordan is no Sam Yorty, who consciously used race to take advantage of the black community and hurt its interest, “ says Sonenshein. But Riordan “does not seem cognizant of the fact that he is dealing with a group that has lost a great deal of power at City Hall and yet is essential to the programs he wants to carry out.” Without black support, he says, Riordan will almost cer tainly be unable to carry out his reinvestment program in the central city. “Riordan’s problems are political and his program is economic, so he may have to do some polticial bridge building.”

Riordan’s strategists say much of the bad-mouthing can be traced to a power struggle among the community’s political leaders. Most notable is the running feud between Ridley-Thomas and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), with whom the mayor is allied. Riordan also contends that reporters heighten the perception that he is at odds with the black community by giving lots of attention to his critics but very little to those he feels he has a good relationship with. He mentions the Rev. Cecil Murray of the high-profile First AME Church and the Rev. Edward V. Hill, a Bapti st minister from South-Central Los Angeles selected by the mayor in his Administration’s early days to be a special adviser.

Moreover, some of the mayor’s advisers note that, election returns aside, polls show a majority of blacks giving Riordan a favorable rating.

“He is doing what he was elected to do,” says attorney Bill Wardlaw, the mayor’s longtime friend, business partner and his closest political adviser, “which is to make the city more safe, make it more economically viable, to make government more efficient. Those issues are just as important in Mark Ridley-Thomas’district as they are in Hal Bernson’s [conservative Valley] district. Just as important. And, indeed, one could argue even more important.

“Now, you may not like the fact that he’s a registered Republican, he’s white and in his 60s, but, I mean, he is who he is, and I think that’s refreshing for most people,” he adds. Wardlaw says a poll, commissioned in February at the start of the ballot measure campaign, puts the mayor’s approval rating at 82% citywide.

Riordan says it’s hard for him to understand how he could be considered unfriendly to blacks. In addition to his setting up the Community Development Bank and hiring more police, Riordan points to the hundreds of minority-owned businesses that his Administ ration has helped get bonded and certified for contracts from the city’s Public Works Department. He says he spends time in all parts of the city, and whenever Walters and Ridley-Thomas have “asked for things for their districts, I ‘ve always been there.

“I think it’s racist to think that the yellow, brown, black or white leader doesn’t care for [people of] colors other than their own,” Riordan says. And a political leader, he says, should be color-blind when it comes to setting his house in order, too. Ri ordan has made it clear he is unhappy with the slow progress of efforts to reform the LAPD, and he moved last year to take tighter control of the countywide MTA, beset with problems in its massive light rail and subway projects. “I think it ‘s a form of racism if you don’t hold people of every color responsible when they’re in positions of leadership,” he adds, referring to Chief Williams and the MTA’s White.

Comments like that inevitably raise questions about the mayor’s stand on affirmative action. It’s the nation’s next hot political debate, but Riordan, while refusing to be pinned down on exactly where he stands, voices reservations about the city’s current hiring and contracting policies. “I think the whole area has gotten muddled, confus ed with anti-discrimination,” Riordan says. “Too many city contracts go to the ‘haves’of this world--we have to rethink that.” As for hiring and promotions, “I believe the city government should reflect the diversity of the city. I believe that in every race, creed, color and sexual orientation we have outstanding people, and we should be going out and recruiting those people.” The alternative to changing standards to include more women in the Police Department, he says by way of example, is to do a better job of “going out and recruiting the best and the brightest.” Isn’t it discriminatory, he asks rhetorically, to have lower expectations of minority or female candidates? In other words, he believes that through vigorous recruiting, a diverse work force can be obtained while sticking to a single high standard for everyone.

Some contend that his true feelings about affirmative action came through in his April attempt to oust Fire Commissioner Leslie Song Winner, the panel’s foremost advocate for women and min orities. She resisted, turning it into a referendum on affirmative action. Riordan scoffs at that, saying “this has nothing to do with affirmative action.” He says he wanted Winner off the panel because she was “very disruptive” and “you want team players.”

He has, though, made at least one personal attempt to investigate bias allegations. When he got complaints recently that the exam to join the Police Department was unfairly weighted against women, Riordan quietly took the test to judge for himself. He go t a 94 out of a possible 100, plus five points for being a veteran. He thought the test was basically OK on the issue of gender fairness. But he seemed intrigued by what the examiners divined from his answers: “They said I’d probably be better at community-based policing than investigating a murder.”

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Already riordan is running for reelection. Choosing his words with the caution of someone who still has not developed the knack of public speaking, he reverts to the rhetoric of his first run for office when he is asked why he’s after a second term. “I love problem-solving,” Riordan says.

He declines to submit to the same written goal exercise that he ordered his department heads to perform this year. And he won’t give himself a midterm grade. “I don’t give A’s or B’s or C’s because that just invites other people to do the same,” he demurs, laughing. “But I’m very proud of what we’ve done. Everything’s taken longer, but that’s part of the checks and balances of government. I believe in constant improvement. If we’re not better tomorrow than we are today, then I will feel like a failure. And I never stop to rate myself. You have to just keep going on.”

Riordan seems obsessed with remaining a regular guy. He says he struggles every day to avoid becoming the politician that he clearly is not. “In this job you have to fight to be yourself. People put you on a pedestal, and you can become arrogant, think you’re God’s gift to humanity. I pinch myself and say, ‘Dick, just be yourself.”’

Over a Pantry breakfast of eggs a nd very crisp bacon one morning in early May, he admits to amazement at the intensity of media attention focused on New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, his East Coast counterpart: a Republican who took the reins in a Democratic city. “They have at least 20 reporters covering him.” Riordan has just returned from a trip to his native state to celebrate his 65th birthday. He went to Broadway shows, Rollerbladed in Central Park with companion Nancy Daly, met with police officials and dined with Giuliani and his wife.

Beside him on the breakfast table on this day is Robertson Davies”’The Cunning Man,” the novel his book club is preparing to discuss. Riordan is determined to still find time for all the things he enjoyed before Wardlaw talked him into running for office: reading, ice skating, playing the piano. He invites residents--and council members--to join him on bike rides in various parts of town.

That approach seems to play well out on the circuit of luncheon speeches, dedication ceremonies and visits to parks, where Riordan’s sometimes tangled syntax only makes him seem more down to earth. The mayor--RJR in staffers’memos but Dick to the scores of people he talks with over the course of a day--seems comfortable serving lunch to members of the El Sereno Senior Cit izens Center or talking with employees of a Hollywood post-production film company about their jobs.

He’s also developed a new respect for public employees. Although his election alarmed some city workers, concerned that he would privatize their jobs right out of existence, Riordan has made it a priority to spend time with the blue-collar crowd. Once a month, a couple of hours at a time, he can be found picking up garbage, writing parking tickets, filling potholes, laying asphalt or trimming trees, 50 feet up in a cherry-picker crane. The news media are not invited, but a camera-toting aide has captured an array of mayor-as-laborer images for posterity. See Dick wield a chain saw. See Dick tote a garbage bin. See Dick drive a steam-roller.

That’s not quite what you’d expect from someone who during his campaign barely hid his contempt for public employees, once referring to the municipal work force as a bunch of “brain-dead bureaucrats.” But city workers ‘performance after the earthquake changed his mind. “The quake showed me it wasn’t the employees, it was the system,” he says.

Through it all, he works at finding the perfect balance between those time-honored American political archetypes: endearing outsider and polished commander. He is working with his commu nications staff to tighten up his public persona, rehearsing his speeches to smooth out an awkward delivery. As his police bodyguard pilots the Explorer to the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel where he’ll pitch his newly released budget to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, Riordan rides shotgun and practices saying his lines aloud. He edits on the fly. “I think it sounds better if I say it this way, don’t you think?” he asks Noelia Rodriguez, his press secretary and speechwriter.

Whenever he is likely to encounter reporters, he is joined by Rodriquez or another press aide who steers him away from the off-the-cuff remarks and self-deprecating sense of humor that have sometimes raised eyebrows. When, for example, a TV reporter asked him if he was strong enough to pu sh through reforms in the Fire Department, Riordan made a crack about being “just a big wimp.” After the interview, the mayor asked Rodriguez how she thought it went. “You could have done without the ‘wimp’line,” she advised.

At his first “state of the city” speech in a crowded City Council chambers, the mayor relied on a TelePrompTer to read a speech so carefully scripted that it even told him when to take a drink of water.

A year later, there he was at Woodrow Wilson High School, adding some quips of his own to the script and afterward donning a school jacket as the band struck up the fight song. Then the mayor of the nation’s second-largest city twirled the student body president in a spontaneous little dance, cheered on by tomorrow’s voters.