Debate Arises Over Development Study

Stung by a recent study that was critical of its economic development efforts, the mayor’s office first solicited, then misrepresented a letter from a UCLA lecturer as being critical of the study, the lecturer says.

The lecturer, who is also a city contract holder, was asked to write a letter stating that he had little to do with the study, which was true. Then, the mayor’s office publicly represented the letter as indicating that he had repudiated the study, which was false.

Now it is the lecturer who is stung.

“The fact that my letter was solicited and then misrepresented suggests a preoccupation with the politics rather than the quality of economic development in Los Angeles,” said Goetz Wolff, a lecturer in urban planning at UCLA who also holds a city job training contract.

The way in which the letter was solicited, then used, suggests how thin-skinned people in the mayor’s office can be. The study--co-sponsored by UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy--criticized the mayor’s office for an alleged lack of sophistication in the way it directs public subsidies to businesses. The study said the office lacks an overall strategy and puts too little emphasis on helping businesses that offer good jobs. The study also said that the mayor’s office exaggerated the number of businesses it has helped.

At a City Council hearing last week, at which the mayor’s office responded to the report, representatives of 40 businesses testified that the mayor’s office had helped them.

Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo, who heads the mayor’s business team, faulted the report for an alleged lack of objectivity and mentioned the Wolff letter as an indication that “the underpinnings of this report were . . . unstable.”

Wolff said he was appalled at that characterization. “If I were the mayor’s office or Rocky Delgadillo, I would really be embarrassed at the misuse of my letter,” said Wolff, who, far from criticizing the study, said he believes it raises legitimate concerns about the city’s approach to subsidizing businesses.

Delgadillo acknowledged in an interview that he had solicited the letter from Wolff through an aide. He maintained, however, that he had not misrepresented it.

A recording of the City Council committee meeting shows that Delgadillo referred to the letter while complaining that the report on the mayor’s business team lacked objectivity.

As evidence, Delgadillo cited another letter from a UCLA statistician who evaluated the report at the request of the mayor’s office and found its methodology deeply flawed.

He cited as evidence of bias the involvement of the Alliance for a New Economy, a labor-funded foundation best known for its leadership in the “living wage” movement, which Mayor Richard Riordan initially opposed. “Not that we disagree with that again,” Delgadillo told the committee. “We do not now argue with the living wage. But they certainly have an agenda.”

Delgadillo went on to criticize the qualifications of the lead UCLA researcher on the study, whose academic training is in the field of agricultural economics. “We haven’t had much agricultural economy here for a while,” he observed dryly.

He also noted that UCLA graduate students who worked on the report were interns paid by the living wage umbrella group.

Then he summed up: “Unfortunately, these facts do not objectively support the [report’s] analysis of the business team. In fact, the underpinnings of this report were so unstable that one of the professors listed as affiliated with the report--Goetz Wolff, who is the chair of the [city’s] economic development consolidation task force--has sent a letter stating that he did not do any evaluation of the [business] team and was surprised his name was associated with the report.”

The Wolff letter, addressed to a city staff member who reports to Delgadillo, begins: “Per your request, this is a brief note restating what I explained to you on the phone in regard to my name being linked to the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education report on the L.A. Business Team.”

The letter contains no comment on the report’s merit. It merely notes that Wolff was surprised to hear from the staff member that his name was mentioned in the report, because his only involvement had been to review some of the report’s draft sections for accuracy at the request of a former student. “I gather my name was included because of the student’s belief in attribution--rather than as an indication of approval,” he wrote. He added, and underlined in his letter, a sentence stating: “I did not do any evaluation of the [mayor’s business team].”

Wolff said he regarded the request for a letter as “silly.”

“Now, given what happened, it appears they may have been doing a kind of litmus test on people they funded.”

Delgadillo denied that, asserting that he had not even known that Wolff had a city contract.

Wolff’s name appears in the report’s acknowledgment section along with the names of six others who are thanked “for reading the draft and providing us with useful comments.”

When Delgadillo’s comments at the hearing were read back to him, the deputy mayor maintained: “I used Goetz’s letter as another example of the flawed underpinnings of the report. I was not stating it as his opinion [that the report was flawed].”

Meanwhile, the statistician on whom the mayor’s office relied to attack the report’s methodology is no longer certain he was correct.

The economist who was the primary author of the report said he was interviewed by someone from the mayor’s office who passed on fundamental misinformation about his methodology to the statistician. The economist, David Runsten, wrote a response, setting forth in greater detail what he had done. Shown this by a reporter, the statistician who evaluated the report for the mayor’s office, Richard Stern, said:

“Then some of my concerns . . . would not be as great.” But Stern added that he remained “very suspicious” because Runsten had not set forth those details as part of his initial report.

City Councilman Mike Hernandez, who presided at the committee hearing, said he thinks “the mayor’s office kind of overreacted to the study. I think the mayor’s office thought that [the people who did the study] were adversaries, while I don’t think they were.” Hernandez said that, judging from his private conversations with the mayor’s office, both groups want the same things.