Gadfly Won’t Be Pestering Council Members Anymore

Los Angeles City Council meetings have grown quieter since Tarzana gadfly Leonard Shapiro announced he would end 18 years of hounding municipal officials.

“I think a lot of City Council people will breathe a sigh of relief,” Shapiro said Wednesday.

Shapiro did not so much deliver testimony to the City Council as shout it.

Five or six times each meeting Shapiro could be counted on to rise and, with the veins protruding in his balding head, loudly berate the council for not doing the right thing on an issue that Shapiro thought important.

Typically a Shapiro tirade ended with council President John Ferraro cutting off his speech, saying he didn’t want Shapiro’s blood pressure to go off the scale.

“I just don’t have it anymore,” Shapiro said. “I’m 80 years old and I can’t take the abuse anymore. Maybe if they [council] were a nicer bunch I might continue, but it’s insulting to me to have them not listening to what I am saying and to cut me off short.”

A retired health and beauty aid distributor who for a while published the 2,000-circulation L.A. Observer in Granada Hills, Shapiro has twice run for mayor.

Over the years, Shapiro succeeded in pushing televised council meetings, holding more meetings away from City Hall and scrapping the Lancer trash-to-energy project.

“I am proud to be called a gadfly,” he said. “They mean it in a derogatory sense, but I take it as a badge of honor.”

Council members and City Hall officials said that although his style was often abrasive, Shapiro sometimes made good points that otherwise would not have been heard.

“There seems to be a dispute about whether he has been an asset or a burden,” one council aide said. “He is a constant critic, who has made some very valid points.”

Added Ferraro, “Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘gadfly’ as ‘an intentionally annoying person who stimulates or provokes others especially by persistent irritating criticism.’ Leonard Shapiro invested considerable energy in doing just that--at over-the-top volume and with complete lack of brevity.

“If he put the same energy into something positive, like building playgrounds, we’d have one on every corner,” Ferraro added.

BEAM ME UP: Watch where you hold that cell phone, or you might get a tumor in your ear.

At least that’s the concern of state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), whose bill before the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services aims to educate and protect consumers from potentially adverse health effects of cell phone use.

Hayden consultant Michael Pipe said he couldn’t point to any specific ear or brain tumors at this juncture, but noted a study found cell phone users increase their risk of suffering from tumors of the auditory nerve and brain.

He said Hayden decided to propose legislation on the matter after reading a series of stories and academic studies on radio frequency radiation.

“If the research wasn’t conclusive, would this be like the tobacco industry, where the state only got into the act after the fact?” Pipe asked.

The bill would require cellular phone retailers to post signs warning of possible side effects of cellular phone use. The legislation would also require retailers to offer hands-free equipment to be sold with cell phones.

In the meantime, the senator and his staff are not taking any chances.

“Since we started this report, what we’ve got is a senator with a cell phone on his hip and a headpiece,” said Pipe, adding that many Sacramento legislators without radiation-phobia have converted to the headpieces for the sake of convenience.

OH CANADA: Mention the word “Canada” in the presence of Los Angeles film workers and you are likely to get an earful about how the industry in Southern California is being plundered, with jobs heading north of the border.

Such anti-Canadian fervor is behind recent demonstrations by a group of film workers, and it now has a new potential target in North Hollywood.

The head of the San Fernando Valley-based Film and Television Action Committee has protested a plan by developer J. Allen Radford to include a branch of the Vancouver Film School in his office complex proposed near the North Hollywood subway station.

Brent Swift, chairman of the committee, recently called city officials who are helping Radford develop the project.

“I just wanted to let them know that politically, it’s not a right thing to do with all the sentiment against Canada right now,” Swift said. “There are thousands of people out of work and all because of different things Canada has done to attract work up there.”

Ruth Atherley, a spokeswoman for the school, said the criticism is misdirected. Many people trained by the school in Canada travel to the United States to work, she said.

Swift said it is ironic that the school would train people for a local industry that does not have enough jobs.

“Now this school is going to bring more film people up who will not be able to get jobs,” Swift said.

Maybe not.

Atherley said the film school has yet to decide on Los Angeles as the spot to open a campus for media, animation and film writing courses.

“Certainly Los Angeles is somewhere we would like to be. It would be a good fit,” she said.

PAYING THE PRICE: The primary is over, but not the debt.

Assemblyman Scott Wildman (D-Los Angeles) said he finished the primary season having raised about $650,000 and spent about $700,000.

To erase that red ink, the now defunct “Wildman for Senate” campaign held a retire-the-debt fund-raiser at Brannan’s in Sacramento on Wednesday night, with tickets going for $500 a head.

“I’m hoping to get out of the fund-raising business fairly quickly,” Wildman said hours before the party.

Wildman lost his bid for the 21st state Senate seat in the Democratic primary to Assemblyman Jack Scott (D-Altadena).

With his campaign debt nearly behind him, and his campaign-hoarse voice almost back to normal, Wildman said he will focus on an aggressive legislative campaign until his term ends in November.

After that, will it be more politics for the wild man?

“Some people have approached me and asked me if I’m interested in running for City Council,” he said. “My hat will probably be thrown in the ring pretty soon somewhere else.”