Villaraigosa Deplores L.A.’s Economic, Social Inequities

California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, delivering his first major address since announcing his candidacy for mayor, on Thursday energetically described Los Angeles as a city of vast and growing wealth disparity where working people struggle to make ends meet and where sports arenas are built to great fanfare while schools are relegated to potentially toxic sites.

“A city that can put their wealthy in luxury box seats ought to be able to put their children in schools that are not built on toxic waste dumps,” said Villaraigosa, referring to the jarring difference between the newly completed Staples Center and the languishing Belmont Learning Complex just a mile or so away.

Making the most of the chance to address a largely downtown business group, Town Hall Los Angeles, Villaraigosa sketched his broad campaign themes, mixing the personal story of his rise from high school dropout to Assembly speaker with the provocative themes of class and ethnic conflict. The speaker even gushed about seeing Bruce Springsteen perform twice in recent days, vowing to infuse his campaign with the working-class spirit that Springsteen brings to his music.

Undeterred by the relatively well-to-do crowd gathered at the Regal Biltmore Hotel, Villaraigosa rattled off statistics and anecdotes that illustrate the problems of Los Angeles’ income gap: wages that do not cover the cost of living, welfare recipients tossed off the rolls without jobs to move to, and soaring housing costs. Throughout, he argued that improving education is key to solving those problems, and he lamented the struggles of the Los Angeles Unified School District and other California public schools.

“We ought to call our schools prisons, and maybe then they’d be state of the art,” said Villaraigosa, who grew up in the Los Angeles public school system and whose wife is a teacher.

In addition to the substance of the address, its occasion demonstrated that Villaraigosa is not to be taken lightly in the mayor’s race. He is the only announced candidate to address Town Hall, a prestigious forum that has attracted such luminaries over the years as Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Harry Truman.

That reflects less his candidacy than his position. As speaker of the state Assembly, Villaraigosa is probably the second most powerful public official in California.

“You don’t see a lot of termed-out Assembly members speaking to Town Hall,” one supporter of City Atty. James K. Hahn, another candidate for mayor, noted wryly.

That same power could translate into prodigious fund-raising ability, as Villaraigosa can, as long as he is able to hold on to the speakership, reach out to potential donors statewide while most of the mayoral candidates will be largely limited to hunting for money locally.

Villaraigosa’s speech lasted about 20 minutes and was politely received, but the speaker was greeted far more enthusiastically later in a meeting with high school students.

There, students peppered him with questions, mostly about schools and education, and greeted every one of his answers with long applause.

With schools dominating local news, Villaraigosa in recent days has tried to navigate a middle course on the controversies at the Los Angeles district, and he walked that line carefully Thursday as well.

The school board, he said, has the right to choose any superintendent it wants, but also must respect Supt. Ruben Zacarias’ long service to the district. In addition, Villaraigosa emphasized that he does not believe the district targeted Zacarias because of his ethnicity--a view that some militant Latino leaders have advanced.

“Accountability,” Villaraigosa said, “has to be colorblind.”

In a news conference after his speech, Villaraigosa said he was confident that former San Francisco and New York schools chief Ramon C. Cortines would be picked to fill Zacarias’ job on an interim basis, a move the speaker welcomed.

“Ray Cortines has a long and very successful history of working with urban schoolchildren,” he said.