Mayor Has Fulfilled Much, but Not All, of His Agenda

Richard Riordan emerged from relative political obscurity in 1993 to beat out a field of politicians for the Los Angeles mayor’s office, at least in part because he presented voters with a detailed, itemized list of ideas for revamping city government.

Dozens of proposals long, the Riordan agenda was contained in a campaign book titled “Turning L.A. Around.” It represented Riordan’s dual commitment to making Los Angeles safer and more welcoming to business.

Four years later, the mayor’s record suggests that he has accomplished much, though not all, of what he set out to do.

The Police Department has grown to record numbers, and has expanded its operations to new levels. Thousands of private-sector jobs have been created, while the Riordan budgets have pared back non-police jobs in the city government. Obtaining permits for city businesses moves much faster than it did four years ago, far more films are being shot in Los Angeles and polls show that residents believe the city is on the right track.

But the Riordan record also is dotted with broken or half-filled promises, from the uncompleted pledge to expand the LAPD by 3,000 officers to the failure to eliminate or consolidate certain city operations to his inability to trim his own staff as much as promised. State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), the mayor’s principal opponent in the current campaign, has highlighted some of those discrepancies--particularly the failure to hire as many police as pledged--as evidence that Riordan does not deserve reelection.

In some cases, the mayor’s failure to follow through can be attributed to Riordan’s early misunderstanding of the depth of the problems confronting the city. In others, the City Council has resisted, and his contentious relationship with that body occasionally has stymied his efforts. In still others, there is evidence of progress, but moving the bureaucracy has proved more trying and time-consuming than the mayor initially expected. And finally, there are times when Riordan has simply reconsidered an idea and decided to try another instead.

“There is an element to this that has been like trying to turn around an oil tanker,” one Riordan aide said. “It takes a long time, and it can be frustrating.”

Robin Kramer, Riordan’s chief of staff, acknowledged that some of the original blueprint has not materialized, but she characterized that as a tribute to the mayor’s flexibility, not as a weakness in his vision.

“One of the great things about the mayor is that he is an entrepreneur of ideas,” she said. “He is quite willing to explore an idea and then go down another path if that does not work out.”

As for Riordan, he too acknowledged that some of his 1993 promises have not been delivered, but he refused to call the failures frustrating.

“I’ve learned not to be frustrated that things can take so long,” he said. “Everything’s a little difficult at first. Our system’s evolved. It didn’t just start off. It had to develop.”

Economic Growth His Strongest Claim

When Riordan took the dais on a blazing summer morning in 1993 and accepted the job of mayor, one of his first and most public pledges was to revamp the relationship between business and City Hall: “I pledge to you as mayor, city government will become a partner with business, particularly small business.”

Four years later, it is the city’s economic growth that provides Riordan with his strongest record, although observers disagree about how much credit the mayor is due. During his administration, public confidence in the local economy has begun to rebound--a recent Times poll showed that residents feel substantially more confident today than three to four years ago--and thousands of new jobs have been created. Many local business leaders report a renewed sense of confidence that the economy shows signs of strength not evident four years ago, when Los Angeles still was staggering from the 1992 riots.

“Four to five years ago, we were in tough times, real tough times,” said Ezunial Burts, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “Today, I think the economy is showing every sign of being out of this recession. There is a positive feeling generally in the business community.”

Fundamental to Riordan’s pro-business outlook has been creation of government systems for managing city permits and working with business owners and managers.

During the 1993 campaign, Riordan often spoke of the nightmarish web of local regulations and promised to overhaul it. He proposed guaranteed turnaround time for permits, an executive order to speed up environmental reviews of proposed projects and automation for the inspection process--all to streamline permits and speed up answers to waiting business people.

Today, case managers are assigned to permit requests and are responsible for seeing them through. According to the mayor’s office, about 85% of permits in Los Angeles are ruled upon the same day they are filed, and although others take far longer, the Riordan-sponsored system has, by most accounts, helped to persuade businesses to stay and expand.

Riordan’s campaign book also highlighted the woes of the film industry, which he declared was “under siege from film commissions around the world working to steal productions from L.A.” He pledged creation of a regional film location library--a promise that still has not been fulfilled but is underway--and promised to “reduce permitting hassles associated with location shooting.”

Since Riordan and other officials combined to create a regional film commission in 1995, the agency reports a 65% increase in films being shot locally.

“We’ve gotten a new attitude at City Hall,” Riordan told a group of west San Fernando Valley residents and leaders Tuesday. “People no longer think of the person on the other side of the counter as an enemy but as someone who pays their salary.”

As Riordan tours the city, it is often business people he drops in on. At an Eastside aerospace firm last month, the managers credited the Riordan business team, whose members are praised across the city’s business community, with persuading them to stay rather than leave the state. At a Sun Valley machining company in February, the president said Riordan and his business team helped her firm relocate into Los Angeles with barely a break in operations.

“ ‘Great,’ ” company President Karina Redburn said of the Riordan team effort, “is an understatement.”

Hayden is far less admiring. He questions the breadth of economic turnaround, and dismisses the notion that what progress there has been is because of Riordan. And as for the Riordan administration’s record on luring some businesses and retaining others, Hayden doubts the value of the jobs those companies are providing.

“The vast majority of those ‘new jobs’ are in low-wage, low-benefit occupations,” Hayden said in his analysis of Riordan’s record. “The mayor is subsidizing the private firms that employ those sub-poverty workers, which is nothing more than corporate welfare masked as job creation.”

According to Hayden, the mayor’s record is even more troubling in light of Riordan’s opposition to the “living wage” ordinance requiring companies that receive substantial city work to pay employees at least $7.25 an hour with benefits or $8.50 without benefits. Hayden has been a leading backer of that proposal, while Riordan vetoed it. The council overturned his veto by an 11-1 vote Tuesday. Although a recent Times poll shows overwhelming public support for the living wage, Riordan has stood fast, as recently as Tuesday calling it “insanity” and warning that it will put the city at a competitive disadvantage with other municipalities.

LAPD a Triumph and a Headache

If the local economy is Riordan’s pride, the city’s Police Department is both a triumph and a headache. The LAPD under Riordan’s watch has grown bigger and more diverse than it has ever been, but the mayor failed to fulfill a number of promises he made in 1993.

The most widely discussed issue has been Riordan’s quest to expand the LAPD by 3,000 officers. The city’s efforts instead yielded a net of just more than 2,000. Today, Riordan says he will keep pushing for more, but adds that he believes the important issue is growth, not the precise number--and certainly not the 1993 pledge.

Less widely recognized is that Riordan’s 1993 campaign platform included a number of other law enforcement promises, some of which have been achieved, others of which have fallen short.

Hand in hand with Riordan’s effort to expand the LAPD, for instance, was his campaign to put more officers on the street. As part of that, he prodded the department to turn desk jobs over to civilians and move officers in those positions to the field. As of last month, the LAPD reported that it had shifted 399 jobs once held by police officers to civilians.

Riordan also successfully reoutfitted much of the LAPD technologically, spearheading a private fund-raising campaign that has contributed more than $16 million in police equipment and computers. That effort, combined with federal funding secured by the mayor’s office, has begun to wrestle the LAPD into modern policing.

Partly as a result of turning jobs over to civilians and expansion, the department has made progress toward fulfilling another Riordan pledge, the promise to cut response time to 911 calls by a third. Four years after Riordan’s election, 911 remains an ongoing point of contention, but other improvements have helped whittle away response times. The result: On average, police now arrive at the scene of an emergency call in 6.8 minutes, a significant drop of 13% from the 7.8-minute average in 1993, but well short of what mayoral candidate Riordan promised.

“I think response time is an important measure of police effectiveness,” Riordan said last week. “We’ll keep pushing on that number.”

At the same time, he added: “You learn a lot as mayor. There are a lot of things that go into police accountability, improving field interviews, arrests, and most importantly dealing with the quality-of-life crimes. . . . We need to do a better job of having the Police Department managed. The management problems, the history of managing from the top down, go back well before Willie Williams was chief.”

Meanwhile, other 1993 law enforcement goals have drifted by the wayside: Riordan proposed shifting sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers to the LAPD, an idea that never materialized; he stumped for equipping civilian block captains with cellular phones or two-way radios, a notion the LAPD has not carried out; he called for an expansion of the reserve program, which today continues to fill a vital role for the Police Department but is about the same size it was in 1993.

Mixed Results on Businesslike Stance

Safety and growth were the mainstays of Riordan’s 1993 campaign, but underlying much of his effort was a message--that it was time to turn City Hall over to a businessman, one who could make tough business decisions to make government efficient.

In that, Riordan’s record is mixed, blending notable budget and management successes with occasional areas in which 1993 goals have been sacrificed to political and budgetary realities.

On the plus side, Riordan has imposed new management systems that have helped some agencies, such as the Sanitation Department, cut staff while still adding services. Management of the city’s 20,000-vehicle fleet has vastly improved, and long-deferred street paving has begun anew in recent years.

At the same time, however, Riordan has run into obstacles. During the 1993 campaign, for instance, his “action plan for savings” called for entering into a private lease at Los Angeles International Airport, a proposal he predicted would more than pay for his proposed police buildup. And he proposed contracting out city garbage collection.

Neither of those has been accomplished.

Riordan said the airport issue has been among the most difficult for his administration, as the airlines have strongly resisted increasing their payments at Los Angeles International Airport. Riordan, generally thought of as a businessman-mayor, sounds a populist theme when the airport is discussed, proclaiming that it belongs to the people, not the airlines, and that he intends to continue fighting for it.

On privatizing city services, Riordan likewise has softened what once seemed to be a hard-line position. In 1993, he stated flatly that contracting out the city’s garbage collection would save taxpayers $40 million, and he cited the proposal as part of an overdue “management revolution at City Hall.”

Faced with stiff opposition from city unions and council members, he did not fulfill that plan, but he credits the effort with helping spur productivity among city workers and saving $7 million even as new recycling services have been launched.

“I’ve always said that I’m not an ideologue on contracting out,” Riordan said. “I’m an ideologue on efficiency.”

Julie Butcher, who heads the largest city employees union, does not believe that. “He says he’s not an ideologue on contracting out, but I think he is, or at least the people around him are. . . . The only reason he hasn’t been able to do more of it is that it does not make any sense, and that’s why we have been able to get council support and public support.”

Under Riordan, city workers have not faced nearly the draconian reductions that some feared, given his campaign rhetoric of taking “tough, hard-nosed” action against “a bloated city budget.” City government today employs 33,019 people, a reduction of just 800 workers from the year before Riordan came to office. It has, however, seen a much more dramatic shift beneath those surface numbers: About 3,000 non-police positions have been slashed to make room for increases in the LAPD.

Still, not all city departments have suffered. Despite his 1993 proposal to cut the mayor’s staff by 20%, Riordan actually has trimmed it just about 10% and admits even that has been tough going.

“I have used my staff very proactively,” he said. “We need to go out and get the best and brightest, and I don’t care if we have to rob a bank to do it.”

* HAYDEN BACKTRACKS: Mayoral challenger apologizes for calling Riordan a racist. B1

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On the Record

Here is a look at how some of Mayor Richard Riordan’s key 1993 promises measure up today:

POLICE REFORM

The Promise: Hire, train and deploy 3,000 more officers.

Status: A record number of officers has beem hired since Riordan took office, but attrition has hampered growth; LAPD has expanded by just over 2,000 (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: Redeploy sworn officers to the street--fill desk jobs with civilians and reservists.

Status: LAPD has civilianized 399 jobs (promise fulfilled).

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The Promise: Create a Peace and Safety Corps to take a leadership role in their neighborhoods. Equip block captains with two-way radios or cellular phones.

Status: Has not occurred on a citywide level. No block captains or other community members have been equipped with cellular phones by the LAPD (promise not fulfilled).

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The Promise: Increase the efficiency and capacity of the 911 system to cut average response time by at least a third.

Status: Response time now 6.8 minutes for top priority calls, down about 13% from 7.8 minutes in ’93 (partially fulfilled).

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ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The Promise: Provide a regional file location library to facilitate local film productions.

Status: No such library exists, though the city-county film office’s digitized location library is to be launched in coming months (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: Reduce permitting hassles associated with location shooting for films and TV series.

Status: In part because permitting has become simpler, there has been a 65% increase in film shooting since January, 1995 (promise fulfilled).

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The Promise: Salvage the social investment and economic productivity of aerospace workers with an intense industrial development program.

Status: Not pursued (promise not fulfilled).

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The Promise: Revise all community plans to add certainty to the planning process.

Status: More than half revised or are undergoing revision. Others scheduled for coming fiscal year (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: Create an interdepartment task force to meet daily regarding previous day’s applications; give entrepreneurs analysis of requirements immediately and final analysis within 60 days.

Status: Not pursued (promise not fulfilled).

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The Proimse: Automate the Building and Safety, and Planning departments.

Status: Invested in automation and created a case management system to improve service (promise fulfilled).

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The Promise: Guarantee turnaround time for a permit.

Status: No guarantees made, but turnaround time has significantly improved--85% of requests receive a response the same day they are filed (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: Expand hours of service to late evenings and weekends.

Status: New satellite offices have been opened, but hours have not been expanded.(partially fulfilled).

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GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

The Promise: Enter a 30-year private lease for LAX, a proposal Riordan said would “more than pay for 3,000 additional police officers.”

Status: Riordan’s efforts have been fought by the airlines, a dispute that he describes as one of the most difficult issues in his first term (promise not fulfilled).

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The Promise: Contract out garbage collection, with an estimated savings of $40 million.

Status: Not done, but city officials say garbage collection is being handled more efficiently than in 1993 (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: 20% budget and staff reductions of the mayor’s and city council offices, saving $4.5 million per year.

Status: Mayor cut his staff by about 10% (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: Eliminate Board of Public Works, consolidating its function into the Bureau of Engineering, saving $6 million a year.

Status: The board still exists (promise not fulfilled).

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The Promise: Consolidate accounting services into centralized department, saving $5 million.

Status: Mayor oversaw a modified version in which the city’s Telecommunications Department, the Communications Division of the General Services Department and the Information Services Department merged into a single agency (promise fulfilled).

****

The Promise: Slash redundant positions in agencies.

Status: City employs 33,019 people, 19,871 in non-police jobs, 13,148 in the Police Department. In 1991-92, the year before Riordan took office, the city employed 33,894 workers--22,667 in non-police positions and 11,227 at the LAPD (partially fulfilled).

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The Promise: Sell surplus city-owned property.

Status: City has sold $4.8 million in surplus land and plans to sell another $5 million worth (promise fulfilled).

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The Promise: Institute an anti-panhandling amendment as a public safety measure.

Status: Riordan recently unveiled such an ordinance, although it is still under council consideration (promise fulfilled).

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The Promise: Institute mandatory $1,000 fines for convicted graffiti vandals.

Status: There is no such mandatory fine (promise not fulfilled).