CEOs Back in Business Trying to Shape L.A.

After nearly two decades of dormancy, Los Angeles’ business leaders are wading back into civic life with a series of tentative, sometimes nearly invisible steps that some believe will help revitalize downtown and remake troubled government institutions--but that also raise new doubts and old suspicions about what motivates this revived activism.

The new efforts, spearheaded by Mayor Richard Riordan and a little-known but potentially influential group called the Los Angeles Business Advisors, represent the latest chapter in the long history of corporate attempts to shape the nation’s second-largest and most diverse city.

The latest turn comes after years of corporate inattention to Los Angeles’ civic affairs. Suddenly, corporate citizens are coming together, largely at Riordan’s urging, to support a variety of projects, from the efforts to build a new downtown concert hall to the technological revitalization of the LAPD to far-reaching political causes, like the campaign to rewrite the aging, cumbersome City Charter.

“The input of the business community is more valuable than it has been in years,” said Riordan. “They’ve become more of a resource in solving city problems.”

As part of its new quest for unity and influence, a group of top chief executive officers has come together to form the business advisors, an organization that bears a striking resemblance to the long-defunct Committee of 25--which effectively ran Los Angeles until the 1978 death of its forcefully congenial leader, Asa V. Call.

The echoes of the past are unmistakable.

Like the Committee of 25, the L.A. Business Advisors is two dozen CEOs from standout firms such as Arco, Southern California Edison and Times Mirror, parent company of The Times. Like the old committee, the new organization shuns publicity; it will not release its membership list or its reports, nor will it disclose the dues that its member companies pay. And like the Committee of 25, the new group includes no women, blacks, Latinos or representatives of the entertainment industry--limitations that circumscribe its reach in a city growing more ethnically and economically diverse by the day.

Still, insiders say there are notable differences between the L.A. Business Advisors and the bygone committee.

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Among other things, today’s leadership no longer talks down to the mayor but in fact has embraced Riordan and takes many of its cues from him. And today’s executives are more subtle about the ways they exercise their power and more selective in defining their political interests.

The advisors, for instance, say they want their group to keep a tight focus on economic affairs, even though they acknowledge that their work to date occasionally has drawn them into socioeconomic questions, such as welfare.

There also are questions about the group’s ability to influence Los Angeles’ affairs in anything more than a passing way. Call and his committee relished leadership and controversy; the new group seems far more reticent, and some critics say its caution could doom it to irrelevance.

Caught between skeptics who fret about the potential power they could wield and critics who want them to wield more, the business leaders acknowledge that they are walking a tight line.

“It’s clearly a balancing act,” said Mike Bowlin, chief executive officer of Arco and chairman of the L.A. Business Advisors.

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Mark Willes, chairman and chief executive officer of Times Mirror, agreed, but added that he believes Los Angeles is in such clear need of leadership that corporate input is sorely in demand. “We went so far the other way that there was a leadership vacuum,” he said. “People and organizations, including cities, respond to leadership, unless that leadership runs amok.”

In fact, the modern history of Los Angeles is in many ways a case study in the effects of strong business leadership. The city’s layout, its governmental institutions and its image in the rest of the country were shaped in many ways by a handful of corporate leaders who managed everything from who held office to who got water.

At the center of that power base was the Committee of 25--and at the center of that group was the Committee of 1, the legendary Call, whose unassuming mien disguised a canny political operator with unparalleled influence. To this day, Riordan fondly tells a story of Call arriving at his offices one morning and finding the entrance blocked by tour buses. Call went upstairs, dialed Mayor Tom Bradley, and within minutes, the buses were being towed, Riordan recalls with a delighted chuckle.

The committee and Call labored mostly in the shadows, preferring to avoid drawing attention to their influence.

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Over time, however, the committee’s influence increasingly became a source of resentment, particularly as the city grew more diverse and divided. Some accused the group of self-serving manipulation, and some of the organization’s members soured on the man they helped elevate to the mayor’s office, Bradley.

In 1978, when Call died, the committee’s influence waned, eventually ebbing away entirely.

Since then, a generation of Los Angeles business leaders has struggled largely in vain to recapture its place in the political life of the city. In early 1996, those efforts resulted in the formation of the L.A. Business Advisors.

Spearheaded by a group of retiring chief executives, the organization came together out of a belief that business interests were not being well-represented in city politics. The group’s founders were encouraged by Riordan’s businesslike rhetoric and by the success of a fund-raising group he championed for improving the LAPD.

That organization, known as the Mayor’s Alliance, rounded up $16 million in new computers and training for police officers across the city. What’s more, said Bruce Karatz, who chaired the alliance and who is chairman and chief executive officer of Kaufman & Broad builders, the alliance--which is still in operation--has demonstrated that business can band together effectively, with direction from the mayor, and make a real impact.

“Once people see one thing happening, they start to believe another thing can happen,” he said. “These things build momentum.”

Still, there was substantial inertia to overcome.

“That hue and cry of ‘Where is business?’ was instrumental in the formation of” the L.A. Business Advisors, said Sam P. Bell, full-time president of the group. “Our mission is to increase the vitality of the city. That allows the expertise of our members to come into play.”

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So far, that has drawn the advisors group into a variety of undertakings. The group lobbied Congress for approval of the Alameda Corridor, a high-speed rail project expected to create thousands of construction jobs, even as it connects Los Angeles to the world economy through a more efficient cargo transportation system. Members of the organization also fought a losing battle against the “living wage” ordinance.

When it came to two of the hot topics in local government--City Charter reform and national welfare overhaul--the L.A. Business Advisors chose a middle course, commissioning studies but declining to push a position.

Members of the group like to tout those two reports--one is complete, the other still being conducted by the Rand Corp.--as valuable contributions to important public debates. But, at least in the case of its welfare reform study, the group’s preference for privacy has curbed its influence.

Bell would not release a copy of the welfare reform study, and the copies that were distributed to a limited number of local leaders all were marked “Confidential.” As a result, the document has received little notice, even among some of those who were given copies. In fact, the study is a comprehensive if not especially controversial report, and its findings might have helped spur private sector interest in the topic.

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“Local business leaders can be instrumental in mitigating the impact of welfare reform legislation on the five-county region by lobbying for reasonable legislation and resources . . . as well as incentives that would promote active business participation in welfare reform,” the report says.

On charter reform, the group’s decision to hire Rand reflects its desire to play a role in that debate without crossing either the mayor or City Council members, who bring different approaches to the complicated notion of rewriting the rules that govern the city. Some charter reform insiders commend the L.A. Business Advisors for their prudence and willingness to underwrite the Rand study; others view their unwillingness to stake a position as a cop-out.

“Their view was: ‘This is controversial. We can’t get in the middle of this,’ ” one influential observer said. “If you’re not willing to deal with something that’s controversial, you’re not being a leader.”

And yet, the advisors group is caught between that brand of criticism and another. For every critic who thinks the organization and its members are not doing enough, there is another who warns that it may try to do too much.

“There’s a continuing danger in efforts to create an invisible decision-making process in Los Angeles,” said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), who unsuccessfully challenged Riordan for mayor this spring, running a campaign that sharply criticized the lawyer and former venture capitalist for his style of leadership and relationships with local business leaders.

Hayden said the predominance of wealthy white men in the L.A. Business Advisors hinders the group’s ability to understand the full range of problems facing the city, even in areas in which the leaders have expertise, such as economic growth.

“They simply see things too narrowly,” Hayden said. “They’re trying to perpetuate an approach that leaves out neighborhoods and leaves out the inner city. They’re pursuing a self-interested agenda.”

Bowlin and others in the advisors group acknowledge that their membership is narrower than they would like, but they say that is an unfortunate consequence of the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the top tier of major corporations. In addition to the gender and ethnic uniformity of the business advisors, the organization also lacks representation from the entertainment industry, a group that is notoriously absent from the affairs of the city.

Bowlin, however, said the solution to that quandary is not for his group to bow out of leadership. “Clearly, we could be criticized for those reasons,” he said.

In contrast to its reticence in tackling social or political issues, one of the areas in which the advisors and other business executives have discerned a clear mandate is in the construction of a downtown concert house known as Disney Hall. The once-moribund fund-raising efforts for that center have come alive since Riordan brought on Eli Broad, chairman and chief executive of the financial services company SunAmerica, to spearhead the campaign.

One of Broad’s early moves was to take his pitch to the L.A. Business Advisors. He urged his fellow CEOs to back the center, not just to get it built but to anchor what he sees as a renaissance for downtown Los Angeles. A number of corporations affiliated with the advisors group--including Times Mirror, Ralphs, Food 4 Less and Arco--have made major contributions to the hall.

In Broad’s vision, downtown five years from now will be bracketed by a cultural hub on the north--anchored by a new Roman Catholic cathedral and Disney Hall--and a sports and entertainment center to the south, where the proposed sports arena is planned.

And yet, Broad and other local business leaders believe that in some ways the most lasting impact of the Disney Hall effort may not be the structure itself.

Rather, they say, it is the unity of purpose that the fund-raising efforts have sown among business leaders--the recognition that their participation can yield real results--that will be the hallmark of the L.A. Business Advisors.

“It isn’t just to build a symphony hall,” Broad said. “It is to show that there is new leadership, one that is determined and that is committed to a new city and a new downtown.”