It’s About Power More Than Policy

Mike Keeley, Mayor Richard Riordan’s bludgeon against the municipal bureaucracy, has learned how ferocious Los Angeles City Hall can be when it wants to fight back.

Nothing since Riordan’s election in 1993 has matched the intensity of his current battle, which involves documents released to a law firm suing the city.

The issue itself is fairly obscure, a contract to develop geothermal steam in the High Desert at the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station.

But the fight is much bigger than the estimated $1 billion in steam power that lies under the barren land. The struggle is over political power and who runs L.A. Is it Mayor Riordan? Is it the City Council? Or is nobody in charge?

At stake is Riordan’s effort to seize control of powerful bureaucratic empires, including the revenue-producing Water and Power department and the airport.

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Keeley, Riordan’s chief operating officer, is one of those people who are smart and stupid. In school, they get the best grades but don’t know the score. After graduation, they are capable of reaching great heights, although they are constantly in danger of being brought down by their insensitivity to the feelings of others and by acting as if they know it all. Hilary Clinton seems like that.

Contemptuous of the legal talent in the city attorney’s office, Keeley, a former real estate lawyer, stepped into a dispute involving two companies trying to develop the geothermal power, and the city Department of Water and Power, which controls the land. Development would boost Department of Water and Power revenue.

Taking the matter into his own hands, eager to reach a settlement, Keeley contacted a law firm that was threatening to sue the city on behalf of one of the companies in the dispute. In August, Keeley sent the firm, Morrison & Foerster, a legal analysis of the case prepared by the city attorney’s office.

The dispute is over whether Keeley should have given the analysis--marked confidential--to an outside firm opposing the city in the lawsuit; he also asked the firm not to mention that he’d provided the documents.

Did Keeley give away the city attorney’s strategy to its opponents and then try to cover his tracks? Or was he the city attorney’s “client,” availing himself of his right to keep the city out of a long and costly court fight?

The Riordan team favors the second scenario. The mayor and Keeley are Hahn’s clients, said Neil Papiano, a private attorney sympathetic to the Riordan side and a City Hall behind-the-scenes power. “If you are my client and I write you a letter, you can do whatever you want with it,” Papiano said.

Hahn strongly disagrees, as do some members of the City Council.

There may never be a clear answer to the legal question. The power side is much easier to understand.

Ever since he came to City Hall, Riordan has tried to exert power over departments that had run fairly independently under his predecessors. He particularly centered his attention on the departments of Water and Power and Airports, cash cows that had great potential for increasing city revenue.

One of his key allies has been attorney-developer Ted Stein, whom he appointed to head the Airport Commission. Stein quit and is now running against Hahn for city attorney. But before Stein left the commission, he joined Riordan and Keeley in trying to force the airlines to pay higher landing fees.

The city, pushed by the Riordan team and supported by the City Council, hired Morrison & Foerster to litigate the question, the same firm that was involved in the geothermal litigations.

Hahn, never especially happy with high-paid outside lawyers, is not part of the Riordan-Keeley club. He leans more toward compromise in the airport case.

“If there was a possibility of reaching settlement on behalf of the city, I don’t think anyone would oppose it,” Hahn told me. “I can’t believe there isn’t some way to resolve this short of spending millions and millions more in litigation.”

The airline trade association has strongly opposed the Riordan-Keeley-Stein effort with an expensive public relations and lobbying campaign. The fight has become especially mean in the past few weeks.

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Interestingly, the City Council is not especially opposed to Riordan’s policy of squeezing the airlines for more money to finance Police Department expansion and other departments.

Nor was the City Council opposed to the city’s efforts to squeeze more money out of the energy firms for developing the China Lake geothermal field.

Nor is the City Council especially enamored of Hahn, who has his own political base.

So this is not a policy dispute.

Rather it is a dispute touched off by personalities, and the Riordan Administration’s effort to increase mayoral clout.

Although council members tend to like or at least tolerate the affable Riordan as a person, they hate his drive for power, which threatens their own turf. This is true even when their policy goals may be the same.

Keeley is the point man in the power drive, and he plays that role with a relentless style offensive to the City Council. As one City Hall veteran told me, “You’re not supposed to act smarter than the council members, even if you are. You’re supposed to be humble around them.”

That’s not Keeley. He’s tried, but as far as Keeley is concerned, humility is a stranger.

So when Hahn blindsided Keeley by releasing documents showing that the mayor’s top aide had given the analysis to the law firm, Keeley’s many enemies seized the opportunity. Council members joined the assault. The airline industry must have thought it was a gift from heaven.

Never have so many in City Hall been so happy over so little.