For Mayor, It’s an ‘Easy’ Choice: Schools Over Jobs

As his administration begins to wind down, Mayor Richard Riordan is wrestling with the conflicting priorities of jobs and education, a debate that plays out in the hunt for new school sites and that increasingly is seeing Riordan come down on the side of children rather than business.

In a number of recent cases, Riordan’s business team has heard from firms eager to snap up large parcels. Riordan’s education advisors have countered with their own lobbying, urging the mayor to support those same sites as locations for schools.

“It’s a big controversy,” said Stu Ketchum, a real estate developer who informally advises Riordan on the topic. “It’s jobs versus schools.”

Without exception, Riordan has supported schools.

“It’s very easy,” the mayor said in an interview last week. “Education comes first.”

The mayor’s actions, almost all taken in private meetings with little fanfare, have heartened some education advocates and irritated some executives and political adversaries. They provide a glimpse of Riordan juggling different agendas, eager to help children and yet averse to publicity that could strain relations with his business backers or undermine school board members.

And yet, those same actions show Riordan at his most effective, demonstrating how a mayor with no formal authority over schools still can affect the lives of Los Angeles children. Los Angeles Unified School District officials are rushing, often without success, to build 100 schools to accommodate a coming bulge in the student-age population.

The focus on school sites plays to some of Riordan’s strengths, including an eye for real estate and a knack for deal making. It also allows him to assist the school board without seeming to pull its strings, a charge to which he is sensitive. Since he helped a slate of candidates for the board this year, Riordan has struggled to define his role. He complains when he does not get credit for school progress but objects when he is linked to controversies in the district.

Aware of the Need for More Schools

Riordan’s efforts to identify potential school sites essentially take two forms. One is a task force that he and outgoing school Supt. Ruben Zacarias formed to find small parcels that might house primary centers for young children. The other is informal--the mayor and his aides and friends simply seeing or hearing about land that might be for sale and that might interest the notoriously slow-moving school district.

“He’s very aware of the need for more schools in Los Angeles,” said Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers.

Los Angeles school board member Caprice Young, a former Riordan aide who was elected with his support, praised the mayor’s efforts to find school sites and said other city leaders are also playing an increasingly important role. Council members Mark Ridley-Thomas and Jackie Goldberg have come up with possible school sites in their districts, and others are joining the hunt, Young said.

According to records and sources, the mayor in recent months has played an important behind-the-scenes role for schools on at least six key occasions. He backed creation of schools in the San Fernando Valley, in Hollywood, in East Los Angeles and at 7th and Grand View streets across from MacArthur Park. He is trying to stave off development of a site near Union Station and is working to broker a deal on a parcel next to a Robinsons-May store in North Hollywood--both in part to satisfy the school district’s need for new locations.

In each case, business leaders pushed for other uses for those sites: grocery stores at three, a multimedia complex at another, a high-tech switching center at the fifth and an expanded department store at the sixth. Riordan often tries to broker compromises, steering companies to alternative sites, for instance, but when push comes to shove, he has backed schools.

“It’s an easy bottom line,” said Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo, who leads Riordan’s economic development efforts. “Kids are first.”

A site on Sunset Boulevard is a perfect case study, according to Riordan aides, school district officials and others. Owned by Metromedia, the 13-acre parcel near the Hollywood Freeway was up for sale, and a company bent on building a center for multimedia and high-tech firms was moving quickly to scoop it up.

Then Ketchum heard that the site would be available.

After being briefed on the property, Riordan was convinced that the land would be best used as a school and that the media center could be put elsewhere, said Delgadillo. “It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but that’s what we concluded,” he said.

Riordan and his supporters leaned on the landowners, urging them to hold off on the sale until the school district could take a look. They also consulted with the would-be developer, urging the company to look at other sites in Hollywood.

When the district dawdled, Riordan intervened again, interrupting his vacation in Europe to arrange a conference call that included a representative of the district and others. The result: The district has formally launched a review of the Metromedia site, the first step toward buying it and building a high school there.

Riordan’s efforts have won him some grudging admirers at the school district, but also have occasionally rankled political foes. Councilwoman Rita Walters, for instance, objected to his efforts to secure a primary center site in her district.

The councilwoman, an ardent critic of the mayor, at first balked at the school proposal, and instead supported a group of merchants who preferred that the vacant lot on 59th Street be used for parking. Riordan and his team prevailed, however. Today, 240 children attend a school in their neighborhood rather than boarding buses for far-flung alternatives.

The situation is more murky at the post office’s Terminal Annex on the edge of downtown, where no definitive resolution has been reached but where many options are on the table--largely because of Riordan.

For years, the post office has planned to lease or sell a portion of its property, but Riordan and others were worried about one leading idea for the site: turning it into a telephone data switching center. That would have been good for the post office but not for downtown, since few jobs would be created, and even less favorable for the school system, which desperately needs inner-city parcels even if it decides to go ahead with the embattled Belmont Learning Complex.

In the initial debate over the annex, Riordan favored the Art Center College of Design over the switching center. The Pasadena arts school, according to sources close to Riordan, won the mayor’s backing because he believed that it would bring jobs and life to downtown--in contrast to the proposal for the data switching operation.

So Riordan urged the switching company to look elsewhere--it is considering a proposal to build inside an old Sears store on the Eastside--and called on Washington friends and allies to slow down plans to sell the property. In addition to buying time for the arts school, that also gave the district a shot at taking over the property.

At the moment, the arts institute is leaning toward a different downtown site, and the district is ratcheting up its interest in the Terminal Annex location.

Influence Comes in Various Forms

Riordan’s influence in finding schools most often relies on the leverage he wields as mayor, but it also occasionally borrows from other aspects of his background. As a private investor, for instance, he once owned a major stake in a supermarket chain. One result is that Riordan knew of an abandoned market site in Highland Park. When he learned recently that the property was still undeveloped, Riordan pushed for it to become a primary center. He held off Ralphs, which was considering building a supermarket there, and even helped negotiate the sale price.

It went for about $1.6 million, and soon will be a primary center across from Monte Vista Street Elementary School.

The tension between business and education interests is such that it’s easy to imagine how it might create problems within Riordan’s inner circle. There, he has one top deputy, Delgadillo, assigned to helping companies move to Los Angeles and persuading others to stay, while another key advisor, Veronica Davey, leads his education team.

The two often come to the table with different ideas about how to make use of available land, Riordan administration sources say.

But those sources also emphasize that despite their different constituencies, there has been very little friction between Riordan’s education and business teams. That, according to Delgadillo, Davey and others, is because the mayor has made clear that his top priority is schools and that businesses simply need to yield when their interests and those of children come in conflict.

According to Delgadillo, that message has sometimes bruised feelings among executives hoping to win Riordan’s favor. But the business community generally has been understanding, he said, in part because its leaders are among the most vocal critics of the existing school system--a system that has failed to produce the skilled workers that so many local companies are clamoring for.

“While there has been some consternation,” Delgadillo said, “generally, the business community recognizes the importance of this priority.”

Riordan agreed. Without naming names, he said one intervention on his part “got me a tiny bit of heat, but it was, like, for a day.”

In general, he said, business leaders share his determination to improve education and add to the region’s stock of schools.

“We need to get kids in seats,” Delgadillo added. “And we need to do that now.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Pushing for Schools

Mayor Richard Riordan has supported these sites as possible locations for schools.

Sources: Los Angeles mayor’s office, Los Angeles Unified School District