Officeholders Neglecting Poor, Riordan Charges

In the closing weeks of his final term, Mayor Richard Riordan is mounting a campaign to draw attention to the plight of the city’s poor neighborhoods.

At the same time, he is accusing elected officials of neglecting the poor, and he’s doing it in blunt, provocative language that has astonished and angered some of them. According to those officials, the mayor, a nationally recognized elected leader who has been touted as a possible Republican candidate for governor next year, should have made poor neighborhoods a top priority eight years ago when he had more power to shape public policy.

Riordan, a multimillionaire who lives in a Brentwood estate, told Times reporters and editors last week that politicians generally pay too little attention to the impoverished areas of Los Angeles.

“They work to get friends of theirs contracts, jobs, and you see this with the poverty pimps,” he said.

With those remarks and other less inflammatory observations, Riordan has tried vigorously to prod the political establishment to improve its record on tackling poverty. The mayor declined, however, to identify any specific contracts or jobs that he believes have been compromised by political mishandling. He also declined to identify any “poverty pimps,” a term he uses to describe people who enrich themselves through nonprofits that are supposed to offer social services to the poor.

In the meeting with The Times and in other conversations, the mayor went on to attack--again without naming names--members of the county Board of Supervisors, which oversees the area’s vast welfare system and social service programs.

“So much of the social services, which are basically county . . . go to friends of minority politicians in those areas,” Riordan said, specifically citing the Board of Supervisors, where only two members are nonwhite. “They’re not putting the poor children first.”

Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the only African American county supervisor, called Riordan’s remarks “shocking.”

“It sounds like someone who’s a racist, and I don’t think he is a racist,” she said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. There are only two minority politicians on the county Board of Supervisors. And I would be very interested in knowing what friends he’s talking about.”

Burke, whose southern Los Angeles district includes some of California’s poorest communities, gave Riordan credit for trying to improve the quality of life in those areas, but said he was wrong to single out “minority politicians.”

“I think it’s unfortunate if he’s leaving [office] with the thinking that only white politicians are providing services,” she said.

Supervisor Gloria Molina, who is Latino, declined to respond to Riordan’s comments.

In his second term as mayor, Riordan has tried to focus political attention and dialogue on issues relating to poverty. Government decisions, he often says, should be evaluated principally on “what is in the best interests of the poor.” That has helped frame his support for school reform, among other things.

Analyzing his own record, Riordan takes considerable pride in the work that he and his administration have done to improve Los Angeles’ quality of life--from extending library hours to razing abandoned buildings to improving police services, tree trimming and street repairs. Those improvements, he argues, have helped all residents but in particular the city’s poor.

Riordan is not so generous when it comes to assessing the work of others, however.

His criticism extends beyond the county supervisors. He accused the City Council of discriminating against poor areas by shortchanging them on street repair money. And he denounced a state law that distributes a disproportionate share of park money to communities where new housing is built, a practice that in Los Angeles tends to favor middle-class suburbs over low-income areas.

In the final months of his mayoralty, which ends June 30, Riordan has sharpened his focus on poverty. In December, he took a campaign-style bus tour of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods to spotlight his efforts to expand services there. In March, he denounced the San Fernando Valley’s threatened secession from L.A. as an immoral abandonment of poor communities in other parts of the city. And last month, he proposed a budget that for the first time would pave some of the dirt roads and alleys that have symbolized City Hall’s neglect of Pacoima, Arleta and other impoverished areas.

Still, some City Council members who represent low-income neighborhoods have been taken aback by Riordan’s increasingly high visibility on poverty issues.

“It’s interesting that we have this perspective being articulated as the curtain closes on his tenure as mayor,” said Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. “There was a conspicuous absence of this kind of discourse coming from the mayor’s office” over the previous eight years.

Bob Erlenbusch, the executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, was aghast. He recalled the anti-panhandling ordinance that Riordan signed into law four years ago.

“Then, he was defining quality of life as homeless people being an intrusion on the quality of life of middle-class or upper-class people who work in the downtown area,” Erlenbusch said.

But Alice Callaghan, the founder of Las Familias del Pueblo day-care center on the edge of skid row, applauded Riordan for providing homeless in the area with public toilets on the streets. And she welcomed his remarks on “poverty pimps” and contract favoritism.

“People tend to treat all nonprofit organizations as Mother Teresa,” she said. “But look at all the nonprofit groups that wound up being indicted and investigated. There’s no question that there’s nothing inherently righteous about a group just because they’re a nonprofit.”

Riordan has emphasized discrimination against the poor in two areas: parks and street repaving.

On parks, he attacked a state law that restricts cities’ spending of certain developer fees to parks in the immediate vicinity of the housing they build. In effect, it steers ample park money to the parts of L.A. where housing is built--often middle-class or wealthy suburban areas--and very little to poor neighborhoods with scarce open space and limited housing construction. Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), a former Los Angeles City Council member, has introduced legislation to enable cities to spend the developer fees in areas farther from new housing.

On street repaving, Riordan accused the City Council of cheating poor neighborhoods. For years, council members have split repaving money into equal chunks for each of their 15 districts, regardless of need. The “Rule of 15,” as Riordan called it, means that the city’s poorest, most densely populated districts, with the oldest and most heavily traveled streets, get less repaving money than districts with newer streets that carry less traffic.

“This is essentially a council policy that is discriminatory,” Riordan said.

Two years ago, Riordan persuaded the council to set aside a third of the repaving money for streets where it was needed most--regardless of the district. The rest was split, as usual, into 15 equal pots of money. Under Riordan’s new budget, the portion distributed based on need would shrink to less than a third--a step backward from his goal even as overall spending on repaving rises.

Goldberg, a longtime Riordan critic who fought as a council member to distribute street repaving money based solely on need, welcomed his support for that approach. But she said he could have shifted more services into low-income neighborhoods if he had applied strong public pressure on the council back at the beginning of his first term.

“I certainly could have used the help of the chief executive of my city,” she said.