Mayor Hails L.A.’s Gains in Safety, Economy

Boasting that Los Angeles is safer and economically sounder than it has been for years, Mayor Richard Riordan took credit Tuesday for helping turn the city around, but he also pledged to propose a new set of changes to the city charter early next year and to keep up the pressure on educators who fail children.

Citing a host of new public works projects and efforts to reinvigorate downtown--as well as falling crime and unemployment rates--Riordan asserted that 1997 “has been a great year for Angelenos. Hope and confidence is all over our city.”

The mayor addressed reporters at City Hall, using his final news conference of the year to reflect on 1997 and briefly to outline goals for the coming year. Riordan also reiterated his call for City Councilman Mike Hernandez to resign. Hernandez was arrested and later pleaded guilty to cocaine possession, and the mayor said that while he wishes the councilman well, he considers him a “terrible role model.”

But those comments were made in passing, and both in the news conference and in an interview later, Riordan emphasized education and charter reform as the main themes of his second and final term as mayor.

Specifically, Riordan said he expects to craft recommendations soon for such politically dicey charter reform questions as how large the City Council should be, whether the city should create a network of community councils, and whether the size and composition of the district school board should be changed.

Aides to the mayor indicated that his recommendations will be issued early next year.

Each of them is sure to invite controversy. Community councils are widely favored as a means of encouraging greater government participation, but advocates range from those who support small, relatively powerless advisory groups to those who believe neighborhoods should be able to control their own zoning. Likewise, Riordan and some other officials have spoken favorably about expanding the 15-member City Council, where the number of seats has remained static even though the city’s population has grown monumentally. The council would surely balk at that notion, which also could be hard to sell to the public.

Expanding the school board, meanwhile, could butt up against similar opposition from the existing board members, who already are sensitive to Riordan’s sharp criticism of the local education establishment. Riordan has no formal authority over schools, but he has taken an active interest in the topic, particularly in his second term.

That was evident Tuesday, as Riordan used his news conference to hammer education bureaucrats, particularly principals who run underachieving schools.

“We still have one major problem in our city, and that’s education,” he said. “We need to hold people accountable, fire people who fail our children.”

Riordan derisively referred to the district’s unwillingness to fire bad principals, whom it opts to transfer from school to school. He called on school board members to back Supt. Ruben Zacarias in his effort to weed out such administrators.

“We need a revolution in our schools,” Riordan said. “I will not sleep until that revolution takes place.”

Turning to economic issues, Riordan said a trio of public works projects--expansion of the airport, expansion of the port and construction of the Alameda Corridor railway--would leave Los Angeles prepared for the coming century, while downtown developments such as the new concert hall, cathedral and sports arena would anchor the city’s center.

Although most observers credit Riordan with helping aid the region’s economic recovery, the mayor has come under some fire for failure to help those near the bottom. In fact, as the mayor was speaking, security workers at Los Angeles International Airport were complaining that they make barely enough to survive.

Riordan opposed the council’s adoption of a so-called “living wage” ordinance, which requires large companies doing business with the city to pay their workers at least $7.25 an hour with benefits or $8.50 without. Although the council overrode the mayor’s veto of that ordinance, the mayor’s staff has resisted attempts to force airlines using the airport to pay their security workers a living wage.

At his news conference, however, Riordan brushed off a question suggesting that the security workers had any legitimate grievance with him. The mayor acknowledged that he is opposed to having the government dictate salaries to private firms, but said he has been encouraging the airlines to comply voluntarily.

“I believe they should have a living wage,” Riordan said of the security workers. “I’m on their side of this issue.”

Similarly, Riordan’s efforts to help the homeless have not resulted in much improvement for those people and have drawn the mayor some criticism.

But the Riordan administration this week announced that Los Angeles had received a $44.9-million federal grant intended to build shelters and to help homeless people make the transition to permanent housing.

And Riordan, whose personal philanthropy and desire to help poor people rarely is questioned, even by those who criticize his policy approach to those problems, then traveled to East Los Angeles, where he joined firefighters and Santa Claus passing out gifts to needy children at a local shelter.

Young children, many of them homeless, crowded around the mayor and Santa, straining for gifts collected by the firefighters and KABC television. One girl, Vanessa Hernandez, clutched a stuffed animal and smiled brightly through smudged cheeks. Her family, she said, was hoping to move soon to Victorville--once her father gets paid and can afford to leave the shelter.

“Maybe there will be snow there,” she said. “It will be really nice.”