Roughing It, the City Hall Way

Anyone who ever had to move into a temporary office or temporary housing knows how these things work. You count yourself lucky if the substitute is not stupendously inferior to what comes next, or to what you’ve had to give up. In other words, you don’t get to drive a Lexus while you move from one Corolla to the next. That is, unless it is your great fortune to be connected to the Los Angeles City Hall retrofitting project.

Ron Deaton, the city’s chief legislative analyst, and members of the City Council are among the well-connected. That’s apparently how Deaton wound up with a temporary personal office larger than that of Mayor Richard Riordan, replete with built-in cherrywood cabinets and a wet bar. That’s also how City Councilman Nate Holden ended up with the largest personal office of all.

Calmer heads seemed to prevail in 1996, when Riordan and City Controller Rick Tuttle pushed for a $165-million retrofit for seismic safety only, without modernization. That plan would have required the mayor and City Council to stay in their existing offices during the retrofitting.

City officials of course shouldn’t have to work in shabby garrets. There’s nothing wrong with cleaning up and modernizing an office. But officeholders seem to have forgotten the important symbolism of their positions. They are expected to think about how things look to the public. They are supposed to think about whether the voters and taxpayers who support them could ever expect to move into temporary digs of this sort.

There are few things worse in a democracy than for a public official to appear imperial. Will the issue of office wet bars and kitchens have the same real-world import as a risky decision on the county pension fund? Absolutely not; the pension fund is far more important. But it’s little episodes like this that stick in the collective consciousness. It’s things like this that make voters a little less trusting, a little more cynical and a little less attached to City Hall and the people there. And that is the real loss, not the cost of a cherrywood cabinet.