Unconventional Financing

A dollar per person. That’s all it comes to. That’s all they want from you. Just a measly little old dollar. No big deal. If you live in Los Angeles, surely you can afford a dollar for a noble cause. So come on, don’t be a penny pincher. Chuck a buck into the kitty and it’ll mean so much to our poor city.

Yeah, right. That’s what the L.A. City Council’s resourceful members are asking. A mere $1 for our town’s exciting eleventh-hour Democratic National Convention pledge drive. Step right up and help pick up the tab for the party’s party. And who knows? For your generous donation, maybe somebody will send you a free Tipper Gore coffee mug or tote bag.

Here’s your chance to be a solid citizen. It doesn’t even have to be a George Washington dollar bill. You could use one of those new gold coins with the young Indian woman’s face. Or one of those Susan B. Anthonys that the post office’s vending machines still spit out. Or take your jar of pennies and dump it in that coin-counting contraption at the supermarket. Whatever. Our town needs your dough.

After all, you’ll get your money’s worth. That’s what they assure us. Why, many of you will even get your money back “manifold,” as one councilman was quoted Friday. Because you gotta spend money to make money, remember that. Just help our impoverished, underprivileged, overextended city put on this convention (to which most of you aren’t invited) Aug. 14 to 17 and, boy oh boy, if you should happen to own a Holiday Inn or a yogurt shop or a rent-a-car joint, you’ll hit the jackpot later, baby.

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Funny how when public funding was requested for Los Angeles to have its own professional football team, so many noses got out of joint. “Why should we subsidize multimillionaires?” “Why should we have to foot a football bill?” “Don’t we pay out enough money now without paying extra for something we don’t need?”

And OK. That made sense.

So what if a football team would stay here for years, and not pick up stakes and leave town after four days, like a convention? So what if a football team is something you could take a young child to see, unlike a convention?

So what if a football team setting up permanent residence in the neighborhood could attract new hotels, restaurants, parking structures, apartment complexes? So what if a political convention is here one minute, gone the next, with nothing for the public to show for it except a pile of unused Bill Bradley buttons? So what if, unlike a football game, we already even know the winner in advance?

Just cough up a buck.

It didn’t sway a majority of the L.A. City Council that vows had been made upon landing the Democratic Convention that no direct public subsidy would be necessary. By a vote of 8 to 5 on Friday, the magnanimous council went right ahead and approved a measure to shell out $4 million more in public funds, thereby making good for the planning committee’s $10-million oops-we-must-have- added-wrong shortfall.

“What it comes down to is a dollar per person in the city of Los Angeles,” was a statement attributed to the all-for-one, one-for-all Alex Padilla, a councilman among the eight who endorsed the proposal. The idea is that a dollar isn’t too much to pay for four days of pure, unadulterated convention pleasure.

Well, maybe it isn’t.

Maybe this is the least we can do to make sure that Los Angeles doesn’t lose future convention business out of sheer embarrassment. For without this sorely needed $4 million bonus the public is pitching in, the Democrats might have been forced to move their convention in a hurry and nominate Al Gore and his running mate someplace else. You know, shift the whole shebang to one of those other major American cities that was bidding for this convention, like . . . like . . .

All right, so other cities weren’t exactly clamoring for the convention. We asked for it, we got it. Now all we have to do is pay for it.

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Not that we won’t get a bang for our buck. One rumor floating last week alone, that Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura may end up working in Gore’s corner, is enough to make some of us here want to pitch in two dollars.

Ventura would prefer to stay loyal to the Reform Party that helped elect him. He might dropkick the whole party, however, if Gore can be persuasive enough. Just think, a presidential ticket of Al the Brain and Jesse the Body. You can almost hear George W. Bush trembling in his cowboy boots.

It would be a pity if L.A. should miss out on something as wild as this--Demo-mania 2000!--just because we were too chintzy to pay a dollar apiece. The council members who voted no--Joel Wachs, Rudy Svorinich Jr., Cindy Miscikowski, Mike Feuer and Laura Chick--might be fiscally responsible and deserving of praise, but at least now L.A. can afford to buy more donkey posters and a thousand extra “Go Gore” balloons.

Besides, who needs a football team for entertainment when for only $4 million, we can watch Al Gore make a speech?

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail:

mike.downey@latimes.com.