Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Their Portfolios

In a word, duh.

The first item on the agenda for Friday’s meeting of the newly formed California Consumer and Conservation Financing Authority:

Adoption of a conflict-of-interest code, a “statement of incompatible activities” and an ethics policy.

A bright idea, indeed, considering the drip-drip-drip of revelations that nearly a dozen officials of the Davis administration had some kind of financial ties to energy companies doing business in California. Among them was the governor’s top spokesman, who said he lost 1,300 big ones when he dumped his 300 shares after word got out.

Another Gauntlet Flung in Guv Shoving Match

Last week, it was former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, togged out in bike rider’s sweats and challenging Gov. Gray Davis to a bicycle race.

This week it’s Bill “Hey, I’m the ranking Republican state officeholder here!” Jones, the secretary of state, doing the challenging.

Jones is daring his two possible opponents for the Republican primary to a lot of debates, beginning at next month’s state GOP convention in Los Angeles. Debates are a way for cash-poor candidates to even the publicity playing field against candidates with a lot of dough. And Jones’ two potential opponents, Riordan and businessman William Simon Jr., are exponentially millionaires.

Jones cast down this challenge at one of the most challenged sites in Los Angeles, the all-but-built but unused Belmont Learning Complex, locus of more lawsuits and investigations than Watergate or Whitewater. The spot was chosen, said a Jones spokeswoman, because “this campaign is going to be about issues, but it’s also going to be about records. . . . Belmont is part of Dick Riordan’s record as mayor of Los Angeles.”

(Although he helped orchestrate an overhaul of the Los Angeles Unified School District board, Riordan had no formal authority over L.A. schools.)

The High and Mighty in the Million-Dollar Digs

Is one of the new powers-that-be in Los Angeles trying to channel the powers that were, in his choice of an apartment?

Rocky Delgadillo, the new city attorney, is renting an apartment in the classic Million Dollar Theater building in downtown L.A.’s historic theater district. (In New York, “million dollar” would refer to the rent; here, it’s what it cost Sid Grauman to build the showpiece theater in 1917, a practice run for his more famous Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, with its forecourt of star feet and star hands in concrete.)

Apart from the cinema celebs who frequented the Million Dollar, like Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, its most famous tenant was William Mulholland, the immigrant who rose to city engineer and engineered the vast Los Angeles aqueduct project, and had an office there.

Delgadillo, like Mulholland, is inclined to the few-words school of public speaking. Mulholland’s speech as the waters flowed through the new aqueduct amounted to: “There it is. Take it.”

Delgadillo has one of the three apartments on the 12th floor, all of which were once rented by actor Nicolas Cage, which explains some of the leopard skin-print appointments in these pieds-a-terre.

One plus for Delgadillo is that it’s within walking distance of the office--once again, location, location, location, or in the case of actor Cage, locution, locution, locution.

Big Names in a Big Campaign

DiCaprio! Fleiss!

Do these guys know how to draw a crowd or what?

The enticing names were at the top of a news release about a fund-raiser for a “living wage” campaign over the weekend in Los Feliz.

It turns out that Dr. Paul Fleiss, father of Heidi, and George DiCaprio, father of Leonardo, take a walk together every morning. One recent day they were talking about a neighbor’s son, Benjamin McKean, a Harvard junior who helped to lead a sit-in for a living wage for Cambridge, Mass., and its famous university.

DiCaprio says his neighbor is the head of a Service Employees International Union local and, with the continuing battle over the issue in Santa Monica, the living wage was much on his mind. DiCaprio called Benjamin: “I said, ‘We want to give you a party when you come back,’ and he said he was much more comfortable doing a benefit.”

A Los Feliz restaurateur volunteered his premises, and a fund-raiser was born, benefiting a nonprofit group seeking to extend living wage issues. “These are all,” says DiCaprio pere, “sister movements.”

Quick Hits

* Matt Fong, the Air Force Academy grad and Republican former state treasurer who nonetheless drew potshots from some conservatives, has withdrawn his name from nomination as undersecretary of the Army.

* Union reps for workers at one of the nation’s largest mushroom producers were meeting with the company’s largest investor over working conditions at farms in Ventura and Salem, Ore.

* Whoever runs the “draftriordan” Web site nudging the former L.A. mayor to run for governor should get a volunteer proofreader: On a line above the box detailing “the mayor on education” is the logo “About Richard Riodan,” misspelling their guy’s name.

* C-SPAN’s “Book TV” dispatched a film crew to follow Orange County Superior Court Judge James Gray to a Costa Mesa signing of his book “Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.”

* Let the games begin! As of today the Legislature is back in town, and in session!

Word Perfect

“I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

State Sen. Richard Ackerman, an Irvine Republican. In spite of unified-field lobbying by Republicans of the all-Republican Orange County Board of Supervisors to stop it from happening, the board approved a redrawn map of the five supervisorial districts--one of them, gasp, with a Democratic majority. Orange County may be virtually Democrat-free in a head count of its public officials, but the job of supervisor is still a nonpartisan one.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com. Jean O. Pasco contributed to this column.