Riordan More Successful as a Leader Than as a Mayor

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan next week enters the final six-month stretch of an unconventional reign in which he has succeeded as a leader despite a consensus that he has never really mastered his mayoral powers.

As mayor, Riordan evinces little enthusiasm for spearheading new laws and often loses battles with the City Council, whose members sometimes agree with him but have little affection for him. Hamstrung for much of his administration by a City Charter that limited his authority--and by a temperament that has little patience with bureaucracy--Riordan has also kept his hands off the fine details of most city departments, preferring to leave operations to their general managers, most of whom he picked.

Meanwhile, his chief public policy mission since being elected in 1993, the rebuilding of the LAPD, has been a decidedly mixed bag: Five years of Police Department expansion have begun to be eroded by attrition, scandal has enveloped the force, crime is on the rise and morale is, in Riordan’s own estimation, at an all-time low.

And yet, as a civic leader, Riordan’s record is a far different one. He galvanized public outrage at the failure of local schools and helped finance the election of a new school board majority. He successfully championed the rewriting of the City Charter and helped pay for that campaign. He led the rebuilding of the city after an earthquake, equipped the LAPD with modern technology, led the campaign to secure and pay for last summer’s Democratic National Convention and assembled the leaders who are remaking the look of downtown--from Staples Center to the Disney Concert Hall.

“I don’t know how effective he has been as a day-to-day administrator of the city,” said Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and, in recent years, an increasingly close friend of Riordan. “But he’s an extraordinarily symbolic, coalescing leader for Los Angeles.”

Riordan acknowledges that his successes often have been won outside the usual political environment.

“Clearly,” he said in an interview last week, “that’s what I’m the best at.”

More Critics Than Backers at City Hall

As a result, it is no coincidence that Riordan’s biggest critics work in or around City Hall, and his biggest supporters rarely set foot there.

Take last week, for example. Some of the mayor’s most important backers--multimillionaires Michael Milken and Jerry Perenchio, along with civic leaders such as lawyer Gilbert Ray and Bishop Charles Blake--celebrated the holidays at the stately Bel-Air home of Nancy Daly Riordan, the mayor’s wife and herself an important civic activist. As they wandered around the buffet, one after another congratulated the mayor on his activity in recent days, when he championed the cause of the city’s poor and leaped at the challenge of fixing up a troubled South-Central park in less than two weeks.

The effort, they said, had highlighted Riordan’s talents as a problem-solver and had illustrated his compassion for people in trouble--a side of him they say too rarely makes its way into the public eye.

At City Hall, meanwhile, City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas joined with other officials in deriding those same efforts as too little, too late--and as cynical to boot. The mayor, Ridley-Thomas said, was behaving like “an imperious idiot.”

Both Riordan’s critics and his backers can find examples over the past year to bolster their impressions of him.

In February, Riordan stepped in to shake up the planning for the Democratic National Convention when fund-raising had floundered. He installed a trusted deputy mayor, Noelia Rodriguez, as head of the host committee. Then he committed himself personally to shaking down his well-heeled friends. They contributed millions--more, in fact, than had ever been contributed to any national political convention.

The result was largely a success. Although some protesters complained of rough treatment by police, the convention came off without serious incident and Riordan proclaimed it a victory for the city.

Inside City Hall, however, Riordan was roundly criticized for supporting the effort to tap public funds to pay for the convention even though the private sponsors had promised to do it without public cash. Forced to turn to the City Council for support, that group made Riordan pay--literally. Its approval of $4 million in public money for the convention host committee was contingent on Riordan making good on the $1-million line of credit he had personally extended to the group.

The most serious test of Riordan’s leadership in 2000 was posed by the Police Department, the city’s perennially troubled institution. The issue came to the surface this time in connection with the Rampart scandal, and Riordan stumbled from the outset.

At a news conference in March announcing the release of the LAPD’s study of its failings in the scandal, Riordan proclaimed the report the most probing self-analysis by any public agency “in the history of mankind.” Then he admitted he had not finished reading it, suggesting that his exuberant confidence was largely based on the LAPD’s briefing to him about its contents.

Having telegraphed his position so early, Riordan then found it difficult to find a more neutral place to analyze the department and its commitment to reform. That quandary deepened with the entry of the U.S. Justice Department, which threatened to sue Los Angeles for the “pattern or practice” of civil rights abuses by the LAPD unless the city entered into a consent decree to force reform of the department.

Again, Riordan initially struggled. Defensive of the Police Department, the chief and his own record, Riordan also misgauged the Justice Department’s determination, concluding that the federal government was not serious about pressing its lawsuit. Then he gambled that he could sustain a veto if the City Council approved an agreement that he did not support.

He was wrong on both counts. Although he argued for and got concessions up until the hour he announced that he would sign the document, Riordan managed simultaneously to annoy advocates of the decree who thought he held out too long and Police Department critics of the document who thought he caved in too soon.

And yet, in its aftermath, Riordan has managed to recover a constructive place in the debate. He now has embraced reform--calling the decree the best deal possible under the circumstances--and has married it to improving morale and recruitment as a three-pronged approach to retooling the LAPD in the coming months.

“We have better terms in the decree because of my involvement,” he said during last week’s interview, a casual conversation in which Riordan reclined on his office couch, telling jokes and fielding questions in stocking feet. “Now that we have it, our job is to get it implemented.”

That promises to be a different kind of headache. Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, whom Riordan appointed in 1997, has bleakly warned that it may take hundreds of police officers to comply with the decree’s many provisions, especially its mandate to beef up Internal Affairs and its requirement that the city build and operate a computerized officer-tracking system.

Diverting so many officers at a time of rising crime and thinning police ranks goes directly against the central tenets of Riordan’s administration. As a result, Riordan emphatically said he would fight any such effort, even if it meant arguing with his chief.

“Some people are saying we will use 600 people to implement it [the decree],” Riordan said. “I say: Over my dead body. . . . I will go to jail for contempt before I approve 600 people for that, before I approve 200 people for that.”

LAPD Gains Have Been Reversed

There is no overstating the seriousness of that issue, both for the city and for Riordan’s place in its history. He came to office promising a bigger Police Department and lower crime. For years, the trends complied, as crime steadily fell through the mid-1990s and the size of the department rapidly grew.

In the last 18 months, however, both trends have been reversed, eroding some of Riordan’s central claim to progress. The peril is even greater to Parks, who took his job in 1997 and emphatically declared that he should be judged entirely on whether crime increased or decreased on his watch. Parks’ five-year term expires in 2002, when the next mayor will have to consider whether to grant him another.

The coming months will decide whether Riordan and Parks fulfill their promises to Los Angeles or fall short.

If policing is the issue that initially defined the Riordan administration, education is the one that has come to dominate it in recent years, ever since Riordan lost patience with the deterioration of local education and launched a campaign to oust incumbents from the school board. That effort, which he describes as his proudest moment in public life, redefined the relationship between the mayor’s office and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Again, it featured Riordan in his role as civic leader, not mayor, since the mayor has no formal authority whatsoever over education.

But now, with four of the seven school board members elected with financial backing from Riordan and his allies--and with the mayor planning to campaign against two more in the coming elections--Riordan has found it difficult to balance supporting his board members against the risk that he gives the impression of dictating their every move. In one recent instance, however, he has discovered a potentially intriguing way to strike that compromise.

Last month, Riordan disclosed in an interview that he was tired of the Belmont school site sitting unfinished, a costly reminder of the school board’s inability to resolve that embarrassing problem. The mayor said he was trying to push legislation that would set environmental standards for the school and release its owner of liability as long as those standards were met. A few days later, he followed up those statements with a letter to school board President Genethia Hayes, elaborating on his insistence that something be done to resolve the Belmont situation.

That took some board members by surprise--and irritated some school district officials considerably--but it also helped dislodge the issue, raising its public profile and possibly moving it forward. And by not dictating the ultimate end to the issue, Riordan also avoided appearing as a puppeteer.

“That,” said one Riordan aide, “is an example of how the mayor can serve as a leader, even on an issue where he does not have control.”

Indeed, it is that quest--to lead without meddling, to push the city forward without immersing himself in its details--that is likely to guide Riordan’s final six months in office.

“He really is more the chairman of the board of Los Angeles than the mayor,” Munitz said last week. “He’s not the chief executive officer and he’s certainly not the chief operating officer. He’s a longer-term thinker. . . . From the start, he saw the mayor’s office as a vehicle to use to improve Los Angeles. He’s still doing that.”