A Revolution Unfolds in the Back Rooms

Last Thursday, I took the subway over to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to make a condolence call on a man expected to become a major victim of the Riordan revolution, Franklin White, the MTA’s chief executive officer.

Most people are unaware that the Riordan revolution is taking place. Mayor Richard Riordan often appears aimless and disorganized. But if White is fired and replaced with a mayoral choice, the event will show that Riordan knows how to shape policy in the maze known as local government in Southern California.

White’s fate will be decided Friday when an evaluation committee conceived and heavily influenced by the mayor may recommend firing the CEO. The committee’s decision is expected to be ratified by the full MTA board.

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White and I talked about some of the political forces that brought him to this crisis, just 2 1/2 years after he accepted the job of running the region’s $183-billion, 400-mile rail and bus network.

He’s a trim, tennis-playing man of 54 who wears conservative suits and button-down shirts. His manner is warm but cautious, the style of a veteran of fierce bureaucratic wars. Before taking over the MTA, he was New York’s state transportation commissioner under Gov. Mario Cuomo.

“Politics in Los Angeles are a little thicker here than even New Yorkers expect,” he said.

“The heavily legislative style here creates more sources of power, therefore making the political atmosphere more complicated to navigate. . . . I think this has to do with the different systems. When I worked for the governor, there was one boss.”

White referred to a local government structure designed by its early 20th century reformers, the Progressives, to scatter power in order to prevent the kind of corrupt political bosses found in Eastern and Midwestern industrial cities.

In Los Angeles, power was split between the City Council and the mayor. In smaller cities, the mayor was just another council member, with day-to-day authority vested in a city manager. The county supervisors had considerable power, but it was diluted by their feuding and the fact that they had no authority over the cities. Some of the most important tasks--importing water, controlling smog and providing mass transit--were turned over to separate agencies such as the MTA.

White was hired at the urging of then-Mayor Tom Bradley, an influential MTA board member. But White soon learned that Bradley was not the “one boss” he had been used to in New York.

Not only was Bradley’s power limited, but he was a lame duck, nearing the end of his fourth term. The eyes of the city’s politicians and policymakers were on a fierce electoral battle to succeed him. Into the void stepped one of Bradley’s appointees to the MTA board, City Councilman Richard Alatorre. He was elected board chairman.

Maybe White saw Alatorre as just another city councilman. But the councilman is brilliant at accumulating power in the Southland’s splintered government structure.

Campaign contributions were the key, the glue that held the structure together. Alatorre cultivated relationships with contractors. He raised money for himself and political allies on the board. As a micro-managing chairman, he planted loyalists throughout the MTA staff. Soon, if you wanted anything done on the MTA board, you needed Alatorre’s support.

Unfortunately for White, he quickly antagonized Alatorre by killing two of his pet projects.

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While White was puzzled by the complicated Southland political process, Riordan understood it well.

Before becoming mayor, he was a businessman/lawyer who had operated for years in the back rooms of local government, dispensing campaign contributions, doing favors and winning approval for his projects.

Riordan and Alatorre became allies, both in City Hall and on the MTA board, where the mayor reappointed Alatorre as an L.A. representative.

They joined in the attack against White. “It was a matter of competence,” one of Riordan’s aides said. The Riordan team cited revelations, many in this newspaper, of management failures, especially in the construction of the huge subway system. The stories showed a management adrift.

The new mayor’s transit goals differed sharply from those of Bradley. Riordan wanted the bus system beefed up and thought the old Bradley policies were too rail-oriented. Riordan also advocated extensive privatization of the transit system, far more than supported by the Bradley team. Riordan wanted new leadership at the MTA.

White’s defenders saw more conspiratorial motives.

African American political leaders said Riordan was going after White and other African American government executives who had been appointed with the backing of former Mayor Bradley, who is black.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky blamed a cabal of board members, contractors and lobbyists. “Make no mistake, these efforts are aimed at replacing this CEO with a ‘yes man’ who will do as he is told--regardless of the ethical or financial implications,” he said in a statement Friday.

Whatever the reason for the assault on White, the affair has shown something important about the mayor.

Riordan is not mounting his revolution by making powerful speeches or holding press conferences, but by sneaking his way through the many back rooms of Southland government.