Mayoral Hopefuls See L.A. Differently

Asked to identify a place in Los Angeles that represents one of the biggest challenges facing its next mayor, City Atty. James K. Hahn pointed to a once-troubled Mar Vista neighborhood, where his office helped reduce blight and violence.

Former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, meanwhile, picked a Granada Hills community in the shadow of a dump to highlight the disillusionment that is feeding the secession movement in the San Fernando Valley.

Those choices and their explanations--offered in response to a request from The Times--help demonstrate important, if subtle, differences between the men. Both Democrats share a belief in the power of government to change people’s lives, but disagree over the current effectiveness of City Hall.

Hahn selected a symbol of municipal success, one that highlights his experience in local office and shows the kind of progress he would attempt to promote as mayor.

Villaraigosa, by contrast, went to a place where people feel ignored, and used that example to argue that his skills as a coalition-builder could help unite disaffected parts of Los Angeles.

As they explained their choices, both candidates said they want to get residents more involved in the decisions affecting their neighborhoods.

How to do that is another matter.

After 20 years in local office, Hahn displayed an easy familiarity with the city’s institutions and identified ways to adjust the current system to respond better to community needs.

Villaraigosa, a former union organizer, offered a more activist vision of City Hall, one that fundamentally challenges the existing relationship between the municipal government and its constituents.

In short, where Hahn argued for fine-tuning, Villaraigosa made the case for an overhaul.

On a recent spring afternoon, Hahn stood on Slauson Avenue admiring the calm. Sounds of tranquil life floated down this tree-lined street in Mar Vista: the ringing bell of an ice cream cart, the lively beat of ranchera music in an apartment.

Four years ago, residents too often heard the sound of gunfire that regularly peppered the night air.

Almost 90 gang members lived in a two-block stretch of Slauson that dead-ends near the elbow of the San Diego and Marina freeways’ interchange, up against the concrete bank of Ballona Creek.

Back then, children walking home from school had to make their way through an “open-air drug supermarket,” police said. Gang members turned abandoned buildings into drug dens. A war with a nearby Venice clique made drive-by shootings common.

As a result, this stretch of Slauson was one of the first projects in a multi-agency program launched by the city attorney’s office in 1997. The premise: Use building code and nuisance laws to tackle crime.

Building inspectors began citing owners of abandoned homes, forcing them to clean them up or face demolition. Landlords who rented to convicted drug dealers and refused to evict them were prosecuted. Overgrown trees that once housed gang treehouses were cut back.

Faced with pressure on every front, the drug dealing slowed. Crime ebbed.

“I want every community to be as good as we can make it,” Hahn said. “If you feel good about the street that you live on, you’re going to be proud of the city you live in.”

Slauson is one of his office’s success stories, and the city attorney is relying on his record to win the June 5 election.

Here on Slauson, at least, his record is well-known.

As he walked down the street with a reporter, pointing out houses that were once abandoned and choked with overgrowth, residents came out to thank him.

“We have actually got our neighborhood back,” said Gloria Prado, 47, who has lived on the street for more than three decades.

Choosing this neighborhood also shows how Hahn’s experience shapes his view of what a mayor should do: Play a practical role in providing services that make communities livable.

“There’s no magic solution to this,” he said. “We initially came in and started working on crime problems, and people would say, ‘It’s about these street lights.’

“We just evolved into this way of improving neighborhoods over the years, and to me it’s the way that government ought to work.”

The multi-agency program sounds a lot like the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention developed by criminologist and philosopher James Q. Wilson: If you tackle neighborhood blight such as graffiti and broken windows, you can prevent more dangerous crime from taking hold.

Is that the philosophy behind this idea?

Hahn’s response: “Sure.”

But he doesn’t dwell on philosophy. In some ways, Hahn’s vision of city government is an extension of the diligent attention to potholes that his father, the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, was so famous for.

“I think people expect government to work a little more coordinated than it does,” the city attorney said. “They pay taxes, and they expect us to be efficient.”

Being efficient, Hahn added, means organizing city institutions so they respond to needs in communities, and making sure departments don’t work in isolation. Solving Slauson’s problems was a matter of coordination, he said, one that can be done citywide on a variety of issues.

As mayor, Hahn said, he would “take every city department and have it focus outward instead of inward.” But he had to be pressed for specifics about how that would be done.

Eventually, he said, he’d like to see more community organizers in each city department, more money for community centers and better mechanisms to get residents involved in their neighborhoods.

That last part is key, he said: getting people to take ownership of their communities.

“It’s a partnership between the government and the people in the neighborhoods,” Hahn said. “We can’t do it all. They can’t do it all without help. Once you’ve got a group of people . . . who’ve been able to see a difference in their neighborhood, they’re going to want to keep it that way.”

A few days later, about 30 miles away, Villaraigosa sat on a park bench across from Van Gogh Elementary School in Granada Hills, where many residents think of local government as anything but a partner.

The discontent wasn’t immediately obvious in the quiet suburban scene. The smell of orange blossoms perfumed the air. The low roar of traffic from the Golden State Freeway floated up the twisting hillside roads lined with large red-tile roof tract homes.

But here, at the northernmost edge of Los Angeles, residents are agitated. Less than a mile away, behind a green hill, sits the Sunshine Canyon Landfill, a dump that the City Council decided to reopen in 1999 and expand onto 194 acres.

Residents had thought the landfill was closed permanently in 1991. The neighbors are angry and worried, afraid of ground water contamination, diesel exhaust from trash trucks and other pollution.

“We broke a promise,” said Villaraigosa, adding that he believes the dump could be closed if there were an increased recycling effort and diversion to other landfills. “The lack of responsiveness on the part of City Hall to communities like this one is a big reason why so many people are frustrated . . . to the point they want to secede.”

For Villaraigosa, secession is the issue the next mayor should be the most preoccupied with.

“I think the biggest challenge facing Los Angeles is keeping the city together,” he said. The Valley makes up 35% of L.A., but 50% of its middle class, he said. “We lose the Valley, and we lose the backbone, the economic engine of the city.”

Coming to this suburban Valley neighborhood to talk about secession illustrates a hard political truth: To win, Villaraigosa needs to convince moderate and conservative voters in this part of the city that the liberal former legislator would represent their interests.

At every turn, he tries to make himself known to voters who aren’t his natural constituency.

“Good morning!” he called from the park bench to two elderly women walking their dogs across the damp grass. “How are you? Good to see you!”

They smiled politely, but glanced at him without apparent recognition.

There’s more than geographic necessity to Villaraigosa’s answer, however. The former Assembly speaker prides himself on his ability to make sure that all parties affected by an issue feel included in the discussion. He is selling his mayoral candidacy largely on that skill.

Villaraigosa tries to make sure he doesn’t inadvertently alienate anyone. To that end, the City Terrace native hastened to add that other, less wealthy communities have it even worse than this carefully manicured hillside neighborhood.

“If the government isn’t working here,” Villaraigosa said, “what kind of services are they getting in Boyle Heights, in Watts, in Pico-Union?”

Villaraigosa has an ambitious solution to the discontent: rethinking the way city government is structured.

A large, sprawling city calls for a decentralized local government, he said, one in which every city agency has an equivalent of the Police Department’s senior lead officers--staff members who work in a specific neighborhood and know the issues there.

“The city government is too big and bureaucratic, and we’ve definitely got to decentralize it,” he said. “I want to transform city departments from these bureaucratic black holes that fail to respond to the concerns of neighborhoods to be very aggressive about addressing those needs.”

How could the mayor enact such wholesale change?

Villaraigosa said it can be done by simply redeploying city staff. “I think there’s fat in City Hall, no question,” he said.

Unlike Hahn, Villaraigosa likes to expound on the philosophy driving his policy positions. He cited Wilson’s “broken windows” theory at length, saying he wants senior lead officers to be in the field five days a week and work with the community police advisory boards and neighborhood watch groups to monitor blight.

“If you let a broken window go unfixed . . . neighborhoods begin to deteriorate and communities lose hope that City Hall cares about them,” he said.

Without a record in local public office to showcase, Villaraigosa exhaustively listed the specific changes he would make to quell the concerns of secessionists that they don’t have input in local government.

Beefing up the new neighborhood councils created by the voter-approved city charter in 1999 and ensuring they operate as independent bodies are his top priorities, he said. Villaraigosa said he’s considering having independent nonprofit groups with experience in community organizing help set up the councils. In addition, he wants each council to get a substantial budget, and residents to have early notification about the issues on the agenda, perhaps through a notice on their Department of Water and Power bills.

Villaraigosa said recommendations from the neighborhood councils should be included in the City Council minutes when issues come up for a vote, along with an explanation from the council members and mayor if they make a decision other than the one advocated by the residents.

“This isn’t just about creating councils--it’s about community building,” Villaraigosa said.

To accomplish that, he wants to organize a citywide congress of neighborhood councils twice a year to help residents see “the commonality of their issues.”

Although he thinks City Hall has let down many residents, Villaraigosa has an inherently positive vision of what city government can accomplish. More than just a service provider, he said, local government can help join its residents around a common identity.

“Being a neighborhood-friendly city government,” he added, “doesn’t mean we also don’t want to build a shared sense that we’re one Los Angeles.”

The bell rang and a gaggle of kindergartners tumbled out onto the school playground. Villaraigosa looked at the green hill rising behind the school.

“If we had the kind of government that was really listening to these neighborhoods,” he said, “we wouldn’t have a Sunshine Canyon.”

On the City’s Challenges

Both candidates were asked to identify one of the city’s most pressing problems and talk specifically about how they would tackle it as mayor.

JAMES K. HAHN

Issue: Community revitalization

Neighborhood: Mar Vista

*

“I want every community to be as good as we can make it. If you feel good about the street that you live on, you’re going to be proud of the city you live in. And we need more pride in this city.”

*

What he would do:

* Use his authority as mayor to direct the city’s general managers to work with a multi-agency task force to reduce blight and crime

* Increase funding for community centers

* Increase the number of after-school programs to put one in every elementary school

* Get more feedback from residents through community surveys

* Increase the city’s housing fund from $5 million to $100 million

* Reassign some city staff to work as community organizers in every department

* Mandate that neigborhood councils have input on the city budget and services

* Require community impact statements for City Council actions affecting neighborhoods

* Create an Office of the Neighborhood Advocate in the mayor’s office to link neighborhoods with services

*

ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA

Issue: Secession

Neighborhood: Granada Hills

*

“You’re going to see a guy who’s going to work day and night to keep the city together, to bridge all these communities and give people a sense that...we’re one city too.”

*

What he would do:

* Decentralize city government and redeploy city staff into communities around Los Angeles

* Increase funding for neighborhood councils

* Involve independent nonprofit groups in organizing the new councils

* Give residents early notification about issues on the agenda for their neighborhood councils

* Make neighborhood council recommendations part of the City Council minutes

* Require city officials to explain their reasons for making a decision different from the neighborhood council recommendation

* Have neighborhood councils meet in citywide congress twice a year

* Change the appointment process for community police advisory boards to make them more representative

* Make sure the police department’s senior lead officers work five days a week in the community

* Open more constituent centers

MORE INSIDE

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