Appointee’s Views Stir Up L.A. City Hall : Affirmative action: Park-Steel is confirmed after saying she backs civil rights policies. Later suggestion of a reversal prompts councilman to warn that the mayor is sowing ‘seeds of racial discontent.’

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday confirmed a controversial appointee of Mayor Richard Riordan after a bitter debate that challenged the nominee’s affirmative action views and raised questions about the mayor’s own position on the issue.

Later in the day, even before the dust had settled on the racially charged council debate, the saga of the appointment of Michelle Park-Steel to the Airport Commission took other wild twists when it was announced--and then denied--that the appointee had endorsed a controversial measure that civil rights supporters say would gut affirmative action.

“In my view, the mayor of this city is sowing the seeds of racial discontent,” Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said of the entire dispute.

Wednesday’s confusing string of events left lawmakers--some of whom had voted for Park-Steel after she assured them that she supported affirmative action--with troubling questions about her integrity and judgment.

“Everybody’s mad now,” said Councilman Nate Holden, a Park-Steel opponent. “I’m trying to reach Ms. Park-Steel to find out what’s going on,” added a confused Councilman Mike Feuer, who voted for Park-Steel’s confirmation.

Feuer pledged to introduce a motion Friday demanding that both Park-Steel and Joe Gelman--a Riordan appointee and a proponent of a proposal to scrap state laws supporting quotas and racial preferences in hiring--appear before the council to explain themselves.

It was Gelman--already an anathema to civil rights leaders--who issued a press release only hours after Park-Steel was narrowly confirmed by the council. The release quoted her as saying she endorsed his initiative.

“If she did support the initiative, that would be utterly inconsistent with what she told us,” Feuer said. Feuer also questioned Gelman’s judgment in issuing a press release in an apparent effort to exploit the Park-Steel issue for his own political purposes.

Park-Steel did not return phone calls seeking comment Wednesday. Her only utterance was a one-sentence written statement, delivered to the City Hall press room by a Riordan aide, saying Gelman’s press release incorrectly stated her views. Gelman told The Times that Park-Steel had “reconsidered” her position on the California Civil Rights Initiative. He declined to elaborate.

Park-Steel’s detractors speculated that she had endorsed Gelman’s initiative but reversed her position on the advice of a mayor’s office that was trying to keep the racially charged situation from exploding.

“The mayor’s office is so embarrassed by this that it has pressured her to retract,” Holden charged. “The mayor should ask her to step down for the good of the city. She duped the council.”

On April 4, 1994, Park-Steel wrote an article calling the city’s affirmative action plan overly harsh and “Draconian” because it excluded whites from taking a Civil Service test for jobs as firefighters.

That article, published on the Commentary page of The Times, sparked Wednesday’s council floor debate about Park-Steel’s suitability to serve a five-year term on the influential Airport Commission.

“At a time when affirmative action is being questioned . . . she did not advocate for affirmative action,” Councilman Mike Hernandez complained during the council debate as Park-Steel, a Korean American, sat quietly at the council’s center table, occasionally answering lawmakers’ questions.

Despite her published views, Park-Steel assured the council that she supports the city’s affirmative action policies. But no one asked her directly about her views on the California Civil Rights Initiative.

During that debate, Ridley-Thomas said it was an “act of cowardice” for Riordan not to testify before the council about his own affirmative action views.

Other lawmakers objected to using affirmative action as a lone litmus test in judging the qualifications of commission appointees.

“It’s as if we’re saying that if she doesn’t hold the politically correct view, she’s not going to be acceptable to us,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick. “I don’t believe that’s the way we should do business.” (Later Wednesday, however, Chick said she would have voted against Park-Steel if she believed the appointee supported the California Civil Rights Initiative).

The backdrop to Wednesday’s debate is the mayor’s refusal to remove Gelman from his post as a city Civil Service commissioner. Eight council members have asked Riordan to remove Gelman, claiming that his leadership role in the California Civil Rights Initiative should disqualify him.

Also aggravating Riordan’s relations with the council has been his bid to unseat Commissioner Leslie Winner from the Fire Commission, where she has been a strong ally of affirmative action.

Riordan has been quoted as asking whether City Hall’s affirmative action benefits have gone primarily to already wealthy minority group members with political clout.

After her confirmation Wednesday, Park-Steel, joined by her husband, attorney Shawn Steel, two daughters and mother, told reporters she was happy to be confirmed. She pledged her continuing support for the city’s affirmative action policies, but insisted that she had no regrets about the views she expressed in her article.

“Because of their skin color--white--5,000 applicants were prohibited from taking the firefighter exam in February,” Park-Steel, a comptroller in her husband’s law firm, wrote in The Times.

Park-Steel, at the time a member of the Fire Commission, wrote that the prohibition was a “Draconian” outgrowth of a 1974 consent decree requiring the Fire Department eventually to have a 50% minority force.

Noting that the consent decree had reduced the percentage of white firefighters from 93% to 67%, Park-Steel wrote that, “fortunately, the decree never compromised on the qualifications of a firefighter.”

Park-Steel’s appearance before the council Wednesday came after two days of debate.

Last week, Park-Steel was confirmed on a 10-2 vote and took the oath of office. But only minutes afterward, several council members learned of her affirmative action views and sought to reconsider their decision.

On Tuesday, the council took up its reconsideration of her appointment, only to find that Park-Steel, on the advice of the mayor’s office, had decided not to be present.

On Wednesday, however, Park-Steel did appear, accompanied initially by Riordan’s legal counsel, Karen Rotschafer. Before leaving Park-Steel to the council’s questions, Rotschafer said the council’s decision to probe into the private views of appointees was setting a “dangerous precedent.”