L.A. Prepares for Role as Democratic Convention Site

The Democratic National Committee has selected Los Angeles as the site for its presidential nominating convention in 2000, an event that local leaders say will enrich the local economy and symbolically signal the city’s recovery from the troubles of the early 1990s.

“There are no major glitches,” one person familiar with the negotiations said Thursday. “We expect to have the final papers signed tomorrow or over the weekend.”

The formal announcement is expected Monday morning, assuming that the documents are signed by all the parties, which include the city government, the management of the Staples Center and the host committee, a private group of leading Los Angeles Democrats. But on Thursday, officials connected with the effort were debating who will attend the news conference, according to sources close to the talks in Washington and Los Angeles.

“We’re hopeful of having an announcement early next week, barring any unforeseen problems,” said Eli Broad, the billionaire businessman and Democratic Party stalwart who is among the leaders of the Los Angeles effort.

According to one prominent Democrat, Gov. Gray Davis as well as Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are expected to appear at Monday’s announcement as a show of party unity. A spokesman for Davis said Thursday that the governor will be in Los Angeles for the announcement, along with other dignitaries--including Mayor Richard Riordan, City Council President John Ferraro and Democratic site selection advisory committee Chairman Joe Andrew. Riordan, a Republican who nevertheless has pushed hard for the Democratic gala, declined to comment.

Andy Spahn of DreamWorks, where co-founder David Geffen is another leader of the convention campaign, said “the staff here is preparing for a possible press conference on Monday.”

The agreement to bring the convention to Los Angeles has been widely anticipated in recent weeks, especially since Thomas Menino, the mayor of Boston, publicly announced that his city had been dropped from the running. At the time, Democratic National Party officials, irritated with Menino for those public comments, confirmed that Los Angeles was the front-runner but emphasized that negotiations were still underway.

In particular, Los Angeles and Democratic officials continued to haggle over the money behind the bid and the way in which convention leaders here proposed to divide it up between various operations, security, construction, contingency planning and the like. Although the amount was said to be relatively small, “a couple million dollars” in the words of one participant, the two sides have bickered for weeks.

DNC officials were eager to strike a deal for two reasons: They had few realistic options and a fast-approaching deadline. The committee has a meeting scheduled for late next week, and had hoped to announce its convention choice by that time.

With Boston effectively eliminated, the committee was left to choose between two remaining finalists, Los Angeles and Denver. Few observers ever rated Denver’s chances very high because it lacks Los Angeles’ size and facilities and because Colorado’s political significance is dwarfed by California’s. Colorado also has a long history of backing conservative and Republican causes, making it a relatively unattractive site for a Democratic convention.

The Los Angeles bid encountered some practical and symbolic obstacles as well. Southern California is home to Monica Lewinsky and the Buddhist temple that stands at the center of the Democratic Party’s fund-raising scandal. Hollywood is also a mixed blessing for Democrats, a fund-raising center for the party but the locus of dubious values in many parts of the country.

On the practical side, some Democratic Party officials worried about agreeing to bring the convention to the Staples Center because the arena is still under construction. Some also expressed concern about Los Angeles’ infamous traffic and worried about the unusual host committee for the Los Angeles effort--a group that is entirely private, and while backed by the city government, not formally a part of it.

In the end, however, most of those concerns melted away in comparison to the advantages of bringing the convention to Los Angeles.

State-of-the-Art Facilities Offered

Democratic Party delegates left a visit with Staples Center officials convinced that the arena will be finished well in time for the event and will offer a state-of-the-art site for it. That promise, in fact, was reinforced when Staples officials presented each site selection committee member with tickets to the Lakers opening game at the stadium next year.

Party leaders also reasoned that while references to Lewinsky and fund-raising matters will inevitably be part of the convention coverage, no place in America offered an escape from those problems.

Meanwhile, coming to Los Angeles presents the Democrats with a chance to showcase their party’s diversity, as well as an opportunity to attract extensive media coverage in the largest city in the largest state in the Union.

Throughout the convention lobbying, backers of the effort stressed California’s huge political importance. California has 54 electoral votes, by far the most of any state, and most analysts believe that no Democrat can win the White House without it.

Bringing the convention to Los Angeles by no means guarantees Democratic success in California--the Republicans hosted their convention in San Diego in 1996, only to see Sen. Bob Dole roundly lose the state--but proponents say that it will help solidify the party’s efforts in the state.

Vice President Al Gore, who was the key vote in selecting the convention city, has followed the site selection closely enough that he recently placed calls to local officials, assuring them that they were front-runners in the convention race. Bill Clinton and Gore twice carried California, but the challenge for Gore is considered far more formidable.

California has voted for Democratic presidential candidates only three times since 1950--twice for Clinton and once for President Lyndon Johnson in his landslide 1964 victory. That hardly makes it a bastion of Democratic Party strength.

For Los Angeles, the economic benefits of the convention come primarily in the form of a mini-business boom for the city’s tourism industry. More than 30,000 delegates and others participate in the quadrennial affair, which also attracts 15,000 members of the international media. Local analysts estimate that those visitors will generate about $140 million for the local economy during the event.

More broadly, the convention will place Los Angeles at the center of the world’s attention for the event’s duration. And for local officials, that offers the chance to show off the city’s recovery from recession, riots and earthquakes, the city’s signature marks during the 1990s.

In recent weeks, Riordan has repeatedly expressed confidence in winning the convention and enthusiasm about the city that the media will find upon arrival.

“Los Angeles is not just back,” Riordan is fond of saying. “It’s better than ever.”

The last time the Democratic Convention was held in Los Angeles was 1960, when the party nominated John F. Kennedy for president.