Hahn’s First Month Underwhelms Many

During his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles, James K. Hahn boasted that his two decades of experience in City Hall would allow him to hit the ground running if he were elected to head the second-largest city in the country.

“I don’t think it’s the kind of job for on-the-job training,” he declared.

But five weeks into his administration, there is a growing consensus among political observers that Hahn’s tenure has had a noticeably slow start, marked by a stumble in one of his first initiatives and by the absence of a clear, forcefully articulated agenda.

Some also complain that Hahn has relied on familiar names in his appointments to city commissions, nominating more than a dozen former appointees whose service harks back to the days of mayors Tom Bradley and Richard Riordan.

Further complicating the matter, the mayor has shied away from the public aspect of his job, spending many days without a single public event or appearance.

On Monday, he announced his biggest initiative of his administration so far--the expansion of the LA’s BEST after-school program to an additional 23 campuses, along with a sizable grant from billionaire Eli Broad to help fund the program. But Hahn has not yet identified where the city is going to get the $1.85 million it needs to pay for its share of the expansion this year.

Before Monday’s announcement, the mayor’s most significant policy efforts were to urge the City Council to bolster neighborhood councils, and to extend the tax exemption for new small businesses from one year to two.

In an interview last week, Hahn said he has spent his initial weeks as mayor assembling his staff, meeting with the city’s general managers and working with other Los Angeles officials to launch important policy proposals, such as the expansion of after-school programs. Hahn said he hadn’t tried to use the first month to set a specific tone for his administration, as is typical for new mayors and other top public officials.

“I don’t know that I’ve had an overarching theme,” Hahn said Friday. “I wasn’t trying to set any kind of tone, other than . . . I want to send a message to the council, to the general managers, that I want to be a leader of a team.

“This first month, a lot of it is spent internally,” he said. “We have a new staff. We’re getting to know each other, and I’m assigning tasks to people.”

Indeed, some of those who have heard the complaining about Hahn’s first weeks in office say the new mayor needs time to settle in.

“I know there are a lot of people critical of his start, but if he had asked me for any one piece of advice, it would have been: Don’t rush into anything,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who supported former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa in the mayor’s race. “If you wait another week, no one will remember it in a year. But if you rush and make a mistake, you will be regretting it for a long time.”

Although many city officials and political pundits refuse to criticize Hahn publicly--saying they don’t want to be the first to take a swipe at the new mayor--privately the grumblings are loud enough to have been noticed inside the new administration. Some of the disappointment comes from those who supported Villaraigosa, but even those who were neutral or Hahn backers have voiced dismay at the mayor’s undistinguished start.

“There’s not been much on message,” said one local political consultant who supported Hahn. “It’s been a slow start, with a couple of big mistakes. The first couple months are tone-setting months . . . and people are wondering, ‘Is this what it’s going to be like?’ ”

Others note that one month is too short a time to judge a new administration, especially one recuperating from an exhausting campaign that ended just three weeks before he took office. Filling dozens of commissions and evaluating departments dominate the first weeks and leave the mayor little time to do much else, they noted.

“Some of it seems boring, but you have to establish processes and protocol about how you govern,” said Robin Kramer, who was Riordan’s chief of staff for five years.

‘Not One for Grabbing Headlines’

Miguel Contreras, head of the County Federation of Labor, a powerful coalition of unions that backed Villaraigosa, said Hahn should be given more time before he is judged.

“He has an education job for himself to do,” he said. “He’s not one for grabbing headlines.”

Indeed, Hahn did not appear in public during about half of the 30-some days since he took office. When he does, he typically makes one stop, usually a news conference in the San Fernando Valley, where he won strong support in June and now is trying to hold back calls for breaking apart Los Angeles.

Although he has held citywide office for years, Hahn himself observed that he is not used to the high-profile role that accompanies his new post.

“That kind of intense scrutiny is something that surprised me and something I’ll have to get used to,” he said during a radio call-in show late last month.

Aside from his 11-minute inauguration speech, Hahn has not delivered a major address laying out his goals or setting the tone of the new administration.

“If somebody wants me to reiterate all the things I care about, I guess I can be doing that,” he said in Friday’s interview. “But I also said I want to get to work.”

By contrast, Riordan’s early weeks after taking office in 1993 were dominated by a public relations blitz on radio and television as the political neophyte sought to start his administration by pushing his agenda to expand the Los Angeles Police Department by 3,000 officers in four years.

Aides say Hahn has been busy in private meetings, crafting strategies to implement a compressed work schedule for police officers, among other issues.

He did find time to meet with some constituent groups during his first few weeks in office, when he talked to homeowners in the Valley and parents in Beverlywood, visited African American parishioners in South Los Angeles and heard from a panel of local biotech experts.

The bulk of Hahn’s time so far, however, has been spent picking his appointees to the commissions that run some of the city’s most important agencies and departments.

In this task, the new mayor reached back to many of the people who helped run the city during the last two administrations. Fifteen of his 37 nominees so far served previously on commissions--many of them on several.

“There’s nothing inherently bad about continuity,” Hahn said.

Hahn’s Choices Called ‘Same Old’

But others have been underwhelmed by what they see as the lack of imagination in Hahn’s picks.

“A lot of the commission appointments are the same old, same old, and it’s kind of unfortunate because a lot of people had hope that Jimmy would defy the odds and break out with new people,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

Political observers also gave Hahn low marks when he stumbled in one of his first high-profile political challenges: blocking a high-speed busway that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority proposed for Chandler Boulevard in the Valley. During his campaign, Hahn had promised the Orthodox Jewish community around Chandler that he would oppose the project. But there has been little evidence that the mayor has worked to sway others--even one of his own board appointees--to back his position.

The day before its July 26 vote on the matter, Hahn said the MTA should deploy more rapid buses instead of building the busway along Chandler or Oxnard Street, a proposed alternative.

Then, at the MTA board meeting, in front of a packed audience of expectant busway supporters and opponents, the mayor offered a resolution supporting the Oxnard route. It was his first vote cast as a public official, and it failed. The Chandler Boulevard project passed, with the support of Councilman Hal Bernson, whom Hahn had reappointed to the board the day before.

Later, Hahn said he backed the Oxnard route because state Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg convinced him that the MTA would lose $145 million if a busway was not built.

As with the MTA, Hahn appears to have had little impact on the City Council.

When Alex Padilla, a staunch Hahn ally, was elected council president, many assumed the mayor had acquired an advantage in moving his agenda. Padilla, however, has become embroiled in a spat with another key Hahn ally, Councilman Nate Holden.

Padilla angered several African American council members, including Holden, by not appointing them to the city committees that deal with social services and housing. The black council members said they should have a say on those committees because many of those services are vital to their South Los Angeles districts.

Those neighborhoods also overwhelmingly backed Hahn, and City Hall insiders have been surprised that the mayor has not played a bigger role in ensuring that the African American council members felt included.

“It’s a test of Hahn’s cachet and his mediation skills to help button this thing up,” said one council member.