Power Politics, Power Grids

Term limits and local elections transformed Los Angeles City Hall in 2001, while an energy crisis threatened California for months, only to be replaced by broader financial worries that promise to dominate Sacramento in early 2002.

In Los Angeles’ 2001, the electorate spent much of the year replacing its leaders. All three citywide elected officials got their jobs in 2001, as did a majority of City Council members. Council President John Ferraro, 76, the longest-serving member of the group, died. Alex Padilla, 28, the youngest member of the chamber, took his place as City Council president. A Democratic mayor replaced a Republican one.

In Sacramento, the challenges were more governmental than political, as state officials spent the first half of the year trying to keep the lights on and the latter half trying to figure out how to pay for their earlier actions. Gov. Gray Davis’ year was dominated by the energy crisis, and he now faces the task of patching together a budget even as he attempts to win reelection against the eventual victor of a fight among three Republican contenders: Secretary of State Bill Jones, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and businessman Bill Simon Jr.

Though governments across the state faced their own local quandaries, some issues transcended locale. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and hardening recession upended priorities throughout California along with the rest of the country. By December, public agencies across the state were wrestling with higher security costs even as they tried to adjust to declining revenues brought on by the sluggish economy.

The enormous effects of the looming budget crunch were barely imaginable 12 months ago.

When the Los Angeles mayoral race picked up speed last January, the top six candidates spent most of the time trying to distinguish their positions on topics such as left-hand-turn signals, neighborhood councils and shortened workweeks for police officers.

“We all have the same vision,” businessman Steve Soboroff, the sole Republican in the race, joked at one congenial mayoral forum. “You dial 1-800-VISION, and you get the vision.”

By summer, with the race narrowed to City Atty. James K. Hahn and former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, the candidates were increasingly defined in negative terms. Hahn challenged Villaraigosa’s commitment to fighting crime, and aired a commercial that interspersed images of his opponent and a crack pipe; Villaraigosa angrily accused Hahn of cynical politics and smear tactics, and compared him to a notorious Los Angeles mayor of yore, Sam Yorty.

Hahn won with 54% of the vote, helped along by two bases of support not generally united: conservative whites and African Americans.

With Hahn’s election, Los Angeles had a Democratic mayor for the first time in eight years. Rocky Delgadillo, a former aide to outgoing Mayor Riordan, was elected city attorney and became the first Latino citywide official of modern times. And Laura Chick became the first woman to hold such a seat with her victory in the city controller’s race.

Completing the out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new turnover, seven new members joined the 15-person Los Angeles City Council during the year, with still another seat to be filled in March.

Today, more than half of the council is younger than 50, and a majority of its members have served less than a year.

Youth brought a new energy to City Hall, along with some gaffes.

In his first month, newly selected Council President Padilla reshuffled committee assignments, giving the plum jobs to those who backed his presidency and denying the requests of the five members who voted against him--three of whom happened to be the council’s only African American members.

Padilla’s attempt at power brokering backfired. The next week, hundreds of black community leaders packed City Council chambers to protest the decision. The new council president was forced to back off.

The far more seasoned Hahn eased into his new tasks more slowly. He expanded after-school programs and won approval for a compressed workweek for police officers, a much-debated campaign promise. He also pushed for development of the city’s neighborhood council network, a promise of the 1999 charter reform effort that has been stymied by bureaucratic obstacles.

Hahn Draws the Line on Secession Threats

The coming year brings a broader political challenge to the mayor’s office: the continuing press by some residents in the San Fernando Valley and other areas of the city to break away from Los Angeles.

Hahn has staked his authority on the defeat of those efforts, and in the closing months of 2001 began to wage his counter-campaign. Even as city officials were negotiating the terms of a proposed secession ballot measure that could be before voters as early as November 2002, Hahn formed a political action committee called L.A. United, enlisting some of the city’s sharpest political strategists to wage a political campaign to stop the breakaway movement.

“I will not allow my city to be divided,” the mayor declared.

The secession campaign, which includes possible breakaway efforts in San Pedro and Hollywood as well, is likely to unfold in the most uncertain of political times, with an electorate apprehensive about war, terrorism, and the state and national economies.

In late November, Los Angeles’ administrative officer warned of a $180-million budget gap because of a drop in tax revenue and unanticipated costs such as increased security since the terrorist attacks. Even with the city’s reserve fund, Los Angeles could face an estimated $20.7-million deficit.

Similarly gloomy reports were issued across the state. Governments, forced to beef up even as taxes dropped, hoped for relief from Sacramento, but lawmakers there are confronted with the same conflict. As the year closed, state lawmakers faced the prospect of having to cut $4 billion from the current budget, and are confronting a $12-billion deficit in the new budget that must, by law, be in place by July 1.

The gap is so big in part because the state spent much of 2001 buying electrical power and insisting that it would pay for that effort by selling bonds. Those bonds remain unsold, and without them, officials concede that the budget squeeze in the coming year will be one of the tightest in recent times.

That would be just one residue of the power crisis of 2001, an issue that came to the fore just before the year began and overshadowed all other work by the government.

“For me, it was the year lost to energy--one-sixth of my legislative life lost to energy,” said Assemblyman Fred Keeley (D-Boulder Creek), who perhaps more than any other lawmaker became enmeshed in the issue. In the first year of his final Assembly term, Keeley spent dozens of nights engaged in detailed negotiations that droned on into the wee hours and dealt with arcane problems never before confronted by legislators.

Other issues were barely noticed in the power morass. Health care legislation was proposed, and stalled. Lawmakers granted significant new rights to domestic partners including gay couples, and imposed new licensing restrictions on prospective handgun owners.

Energy Woes Taxed Politicians and Public

Even legislative reapportionment, which can make or break politicians’ careers, received merely passing notice in 2001. The plan worked out by the Senate and Assembly was easily approved.

For all involved, energy was the most complex policy issue they had ever faced. Independent power companies were charging utilities unheard of sums for wholesale electricity. The state was forced to get into the power business when major utilities exhausted their credit. And the term “rolling blackout” entered the general lexicon.

Davis spent most of the first four months of the year scrambling to keep the lights on--failing six times when blackouts hit--and trying to block an electricity rate hike, fearing a ratepayer revolt that would rival the property tax-slashing Proposition 13 of 1978.

By April, the state Public Utilities Commission had stepped in and raised rates, prompting Davis to go on statewide television to announce that he too relented and would support a rate hike. He had hoped that action would have eased financial pressure on the utilities.

But the following day, Pacific Gas & Electric, the century-old mammoth utility that is among the state’s biggest private employers, concluded that the rate hike came too late and was insufficient, and that state politicians were unable to solve its problem.

“The negotiations that we have been involved in since last November are going nowhere,” Robert Glynn, chairman of PG&E; Corp., said on the day the firm filed its bankruptcy petition.

Davis was furious: “I believe PG&E; has dishonored itself and has created undue alarm among 34 million residents.”

The governor ordered his aides to seal a deal to save Southern California Edison from the same fate. By the following week, Davis and Edison had unveiled an agreement that he insisted would rescue the company.

It fell through, however. Republicans refused to support it, as did Democrats in the state Senate. Once again, the PUC stepped in, working out a deal to save Edison from bankruptcy.

By the end of the year, rolling blackouts were a fading memory, and officials in Sacramento were awaiting, with dread, the next crisis: the governor’s budget proposal.

That document will be on lawmakers’ desks in the coming weeks, and they will debate it under the full glare of a gubernatorial campaign, a contest that promises to dominate California’s government and politics for most of 2002.

Earlier installments of this series are available at https://www.latimes.com/reflections2001.