Riordan Calls Education Key to City’s Rebound

Buoyed by presentations suggesting that Los Angeles is amid a broad, though somewhat uneven, economic recovery, Mayor Richard Riordan on Wednesday told an elite group of civic leaders that the city has rebounded from the 1992 riots but needs to redouble its commitment to education if it hopes to continue growing and prospering.

“Today, Los Angeles is not just back, it’s better,” Riordan said at a one-day conference co-hosted by the Milken Institute for Jobs and Capital Formation, an economically focused public policy group funded by convicted stock manipulator Michael Milken. “It’s looking toward the next century with more going for it than any city in the world.”

Other attendees at the conference--which brought together business, political and community leaders from across the city--painted a less glowing picture, but nevertheless echoed Riordan’s assessment that the Los Angeles economy has substantially improved in the last four years.

Analyst Joel Kotkin presented figures showing that Los Angeles has reduced unemployment in the last year more than any other major American city. And though Kotkin, an adjunct scholar of the Milken Institute, noted that the aerospace business has lost jobs in recent years, he said that growth in the movie industry has more than compensated for those losses, while manufacturing employment has steadily increased.

Amid the mostly good economic news, however, some conference participants warned that the job growth masks problems--high-paying jobs in aerospace, for instance, being replaced by lower-paying manufacturing and garment industry jobs. What’s more, participants said that continued growth depends on improvement in local schools and accelerated efforts to shore up the city’s public safety system.

Riordan said he is dispatching staffers to New York to study that city’s Police Department, and stressed that strong measures are needed to improve public schools.

“In the future, we will not attract high-tech businesses to our city unless we have people who can fill those jobs,” he said. The solution, according to Riordan: school accountability, including “having the backbone to fire people who fail our children.”

As for law enforcement, Riordan told conference guests that he is “challenging the [Police] Department . . . to do a much better job of deploying the resources that they have.”

That hearkens to a familiar theme for the mayor, who commandingly won reelection this month and who has made no secret of his determination to improve the LAPD’s performance. Although crime has fallen steadily during Riordan’s administration--and the mayor has found money to hire more than 2,000 police officers--he has often expressed concerns about the effectiveness of LAPD management. Among other things, Riordan is pushing the department to allow lower-ranking officers more authority rather than centralizing power at headquarters.

Wednesday’s conference was timed to occur almost exactly five years after Los Angeles was racked by the riots that erupted in the wake of the not guilty verdicts returned against four police officers in the beating of Rodney G. King. The recovery effort from those disastrous riots was spearheaded not by the government but by a private organization initially known as Rebuild Los Angeles and later renamed RLA.

That group’s final report, released Wednesday, documents millions of dollars in corporate investment for South Los Angeles, but also demonstrates the degree to which RLA fell short both of the need and of its own estimates.

The group’s consultant at one point estimated that $6 billion was needed to revive neglected areas of Los Angeles. And RLA’s original chairman, Peter V. Ueberroth, announced that 500 companies were working on plans to invest more than $1 billion.

In fact, the final report shows a total of $497 million in corporate commitments, of which $389 million had been spent as of the end of 1996.

Kathleen Brown, the former California treasurer elected as RLA head in early 1996, acknowledged that some of the rebuilding efforts fell short of their goals, but added that the investments that had been made “have built a successful foundation,” a theme echoed by other RLA officials and conference participants.

“Some portray the progress . . . as the glass is half-empty,” said Linda Griego, who was made president and chief executive officer of RLA in 1994. “I see the glass as half-full.”

According to Griego and RLA’s final report, 85% of the properties damaged in the 1992 riots have been repaired or rebuilt, and new investments in the hardest-hit areas have helped provide jobs and services. “A tremendous amount of rebuilding has occurred in the last five years,” Griego said.

Despite that rosy assessment, conference participants warned that long-term progress for the city may depend on improved education and job training--the same theme sounded by Riordan in his opening remarks. One fashion industry representative complained that she has difficulty finding workers with skills to advance beyond the sewing machine, and one educator warned that many schools provide valuable teaching to college-bound students but little practical vocational help for those young people choosing not to go to college.

Most conference participants broached that topic gingerly, but Michael Roos, the president of LEARN, a school reform effort, said the problems demanded immediate attention.

“You’re talking about urban school systems that need to be stood on the head and shaken thoroughly,” he said.

Roos emphasized the danger of promoting students from one grade to the next without establishing solid criteria for advancement.

“This is an outrage,” Roos said. “It’s evil.”

* RADIO ON THE RIOTS

Many stations will offer programs to mark the five-year anniversary of the unrest. F18