Controversial Commissioner Gelman Quits : Politics: Mayor announces the resignation to calm tempers. Appointee had claimed that a newly named panelist backed his attack on affirmative action.

Seeking to defuse a racially charged situation and placate an angry phalanx of Los Angeles City Council members, Mayor Richard Riordan on Thursday secured the resignation of one of his controversial commissioners--the spokesman for a ballot proposal that attacks traditional affirmative action programs.

Riordan said Joe Gelman’s resignation from the Civil Service Commission was welcome because Gelman had improperly claimed that another of the mayor’s commissioners, Michelle Park-Steel, had endorsed Gelman’s “California civil rights initiative.” In fact, Riordan said, Park-Steel had done no such thing.

“I was very upset and unhappy about what happened,” Riordan said at a news conference. “The actions by Mr. Gelman were very, very improper . . . a tremendous embarrassment . . . divisive and irresponsible.”

Park-Steel, who was confirmed by the council Wednesday as an airport commissioner, is a “wonderful, wonderful woman,” Riordan said. “I absolutely stand by her appointment.”

Riordan also denied that his falling-out with Gelman stemmed from the commissioner’s criticism of traditional affirmative action programs.

“I don’t censor my appointees,” he said. “We shouldn’t have litmus tests.”

Gelman, while accepting his departure from Riordan’s official family with equanimity, denied ever misrepresenting Park-Steel’s position on the initiative. The measure, which backers hope to place on the 1996 state ballot, would ban ethnic or gender preferences in state hiring, contracting and college admissions.

Gelman’s contention that Park-Steel supports his initiative is likely to keep Park-Steel, the wife of the treasurer of the California Republican Party, and Riordan, her political patron, on the hot seat. The initiative is believed to be highly popular among the middle-class white voters who helped propel Riordan, a Republican businessman, into the mayor’s office in this traditionally Democratic city.

“One down, one to go,” said Councilman Nate Holden, alluding to a demand that he and three other council members made Thursday that Riordan fire Gelman and Park-Steel.

Although the outcry against Park-Steel is of recent vintage, minority and liberal council members for months have been unsuccessfully urging Riordan to remove Gelman because of his views on affirmative action.

Meanwhile, the mayor, challenged by some council members to go public with his own views on affirmative action, told reporters he has not yet taken a position on the ballot initiative.

“I’m not making any answers on that right now,” he said. “I’m developing a program [on affirmative action] which I will probably come out with within the next month. . . . It’s not a simple issue.

“The question is, how do you create diversity and still keep up the standards of the city?” he said.

The dispute over Gelman and Park-Steel went ballistic Wednesday. Shortly after a sharply divided council voted 8 to 6 to confirm Park-Steel’s appointment as an airport commissioner, Gelman announced that Park-Steel was endorsing his ballot measure.

The announcement appeared to undercut Park-Steel’s testimony during her grueling confirmation hearing, in which she said she supported the city’s affirmative action policies. It infuriated and dismayed City Council members.

Some of them, including Mark Ridley-Thomas, charged that Riordan, by appointing candidates such as Park-Steel and Gelman to city posts, was contributing to racial tension in the city.

At a news conference Thursday to announce the city’s receipt of a $48-million federal grant to hire more police officers, Riordan stopped short of saying he had demanded the resignation of Gelman. But later, the mayor’s office said that Riordan, after being warned by council President John Ferraro that Gelman was a huge liability for his Administration, was preparing to demand Gelman’s resignation.

Gelman later called his departure from the commission the product of a “mutual agreement” between him and the mayor that was reached after a day of soul-searching and conferences, including a talk with Riordan’s top political confidant, attorney William Wardlaw.

“Wardlaw told me the mayor was in a bad situation,” Gelman said. Gelman said he concluded that his resignation was needed to “calm the situation down.”

“When the barbarians are at the gate, you have to throw them red meat,” Gelman said. He condemned his City Council opponents for “doing everything they can to muzzle a debate” about what he called the discriminatory effects of affirmative action programs.

Gelman also vehemently denied lying about Park-Steel’s conversion to the cause of the “California civil rights initiative.”

“I never misrepresented her views,” he said. “I deny that.”

Gelman’s departure Thursday came only hours after council members Holden, Ridley-Thomas, Jackie Goldberg and Mike Hernandez called on Riordan to fire Gelman and Park-Steel. Holden said the pair should go because they supported a ballot measure that is inconsistent with the city’s affirmative action policies. Holden said he was convinced that Park-Steel had lied to the council about her views simply to win appointment.

Goldberg, however, said that while their views were abhorrent to her, she objected to their appointments because they were using their city positions to advance their personal political agenda of overturning affirmative action rules.

Like Holden, Goldberg said she believed Park-Steel had actually endorsed the ballot initiative, backing down only after it caused an uproar. She said it would take “a huge leap of faith . . . to believe” that Gelman fabricated Park-Steel’s endorsement. “He’s a zealot about his position, but he’s not a fool,” she said.

In his resignation letter, Gelman said he “will not rest until discriminatory preferences are eliminated as a public policy in our city.”