The Politics of Downtown Survival--It’s Silly Season

A woman best known to TV news viewers for her frog-suited protests against wetland development has attacked the ecological record of the major backer of the proposed downtown sports arena. Representatives of an inner-city Sierra Club chapter asked, more seriously, why the arena backers didn’t foresee the project’s effects on the surrounding poor neighborhoods.

And the leader of the city’s archdiocese weighed in to chastize arena referendum-seekers without even indicating what point of Catholic dogma requires the Los Angeles Lakers to play within city limits. The following week, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, unself-consciously, unsuccessfully and absurdly, sought to arbitrate the dispute.

September was quite a month on the downtown arena front. Like deep-sea marine life caught in the spotlight of a low-diving submarine, the controversy’s glare showed us the everyday writhings of the creatures of millennial Los Angeles politics in an eerie and uncommon display. No one says it was a pretty sight.

Rumors abound at City Hall that the crisis is on the verge of solution. Meanwhile, however, the proposal has become so divisive that it has temporarily severed Mayor Richard Riordan, an original supporter of the project who is using the claim of a conflict of interest to lie low, from his long-time friend and advisor, Michael D. Keeley. Keeley is working, pro bono, with Councilman Joel Wachs, who seeks a referendum on the proposal. The referendum plan, in turn, provoked Mahony to attack the city councilman for his “exaggerated hostility and opposition to such a fine facility.”

Wachs doesn’t dispute that the facility would indeed be “fine.” It’s just that he would like to see the public have a chance to approve using $70 million in city money toward its completion.

But the arena backers, billionaire Philip F. Anschutz and City of Industry developer Edward P. Roski, vow to walk if the $300 million project ever goes to referen- dum--even if it wins. Meanwhile, the Malibu-based Wetlands Action Network’s Marcia Hanscom deplored the Denver-based Anschutz for reputedly building five acres of golf course over some protected Colorado wetlands.

And the beat goes on.

News people used to call late summer the “silly season,” the time when saucer sightings made the front page. Last month, at least, sports-arena stories more than filled that niche.

Has anything since the great busing crises of 20 years ago, or the fluoridation debate of the more distant Southland past, done a better job of exposing the intrinsic daftness of Los Angeles politics? Has any plan that would have less effect on more people kicked up such a political ruckus?

Yet, just as on the ocean floor, a real life-and-death struggle lies behind the absurdity. It has to do with that ever-rising mistrust of government that’s now even swamped the Republican mayor who rode it into office. Also with the downtown establishment’s equal distrust--particularly since Proposition 13--of the electorate. The establishment assumes voters, at least when it comes to spending tax dollars, are thoroughly downtown-averse. But the establishment’s own creed is that the old urban core will rise from the rubbish only if the arena can be slipped past the populace to join Disney Hall and Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in what’s termed the city’s “new mosaic.”

Others may see a developmental “Three Musketeers” intended to defend the sagging values of downtown real estate--not excluding certain well-known properties under the cardinal’s authority. All three of the proposed mega-barns have been controversial. But the arena is the only one dependent on city funds--that $70 million city-backed loan needed to buy parking space. No one, really, has been able to say exactly why this expenditure has garnered such well-publicized public outrage, but, to many, it seems to symbolize representative government’s irresponsibility toward the public at large. The feeling runs highest in the San Fernando Valley--witness the reported lynch-mob reception that arena project spokesman John H. Semcken III got from the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. There may be a connection between some arena opponents and the Valley secession movement that still wants to divide the city: To secessionists, anything good for downtown L.A. is a black eye for the Valley.

There’s also the next mayor’s race to think about. Wachs clearly can’t (at least not yet) run for mayor of the San Fernando Valley, and he insists that his referendum has supporters all over the city. At the same time, City Hall gossip has arena ringmaster and Deputy Mayor Steven L. Soboroff as Riordan’s successor candidate. Maybe this is the silliest notion of all--trying to call the 2001 election back in the previous millennium. Let’s not forget Riordan himself didn’t announce his candidacy until 1993, the year in which he got elected.

Oddly, Riordan himself, just as he has been elusive on the secession issue, is conspicuous by his absence in the arena struggle. He has officially put himself out of the picture here because of a prime interest conflict--he owns the Original Pantry Cafe, a restaurant nearby that would benefit from the arena the way the Trojan Barrel used to benefit from USC.

OK, that’s a perceptible interest conflict. But the way Riordan has chosen to resolve it exposes his priorities. Philosophers say that if you believe in something, you are prepared to act on it. Certainly, you might expect, if the arena is the key to downtown survival that Riordan’s office has said it is, and if that survival matters to Riordan, the multi-multimillionaire mayor ought to defer his priorities from his private to the public interest. Thus, he might sell the Pantry (an old-time, big-city mayor like Boston’s James Michael Curley would have publicized the pro bono sacrifice of “the mayor’s own little saloon” into the emotionally sublime) and then lead the arena party’s charge. Or he might even manage, as has been his reputed wont in other crises, to broker agreement among the estranged and warring parties, while personally making sure the affected neighborhoods get a decent shake.

But, no. All Riordan has done, so far, is to flail at his former trusted colleague Keeley for “having turned your back” on something so good for the city. (Keeley is said to believe he’s simply bringing more lucidity to Wachs’ side). So it looks like our public-private-partnership mayor still doesn’t get the difference between being a private benefactor and a public servant. Which is also the difference between largess and responsibility.

The mayor’s own leadership priorities and deficiencies lie at the core of the arena conundrum. He’s seeking a City Charter change that would strengthen the mayor’s office, but in the arena matter, he’s shown, yet again, that what he really needs to do is to strengthen himself. To put his job first.

It may be by default. But Wachs, by asking tough questions and waving the baton of referendum, looks more like the arena issue’s key political player, if not the guardian of public interests.

While to the backers of the arena, Riordan must seem like a sidelines kibitzer. Or perhaps a particularly shy and elusive form of deep-sea marine life. Look, over behind that rock!

Ahh, you missed it.*