Riordan Faced Hurdles as a City Hall Outsider

By TED ROHRLICH

Feb. 21, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In eight years as mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan never mastered City Hall. Political obstacles, including sustained clashes with the City Council, proved too much to overcome and forced him to alter the visions of change that helped him win office in his first try.

He failed, for instance, to expand the Los Angeles Police Department as much as he wanted to, to streamline and make more equitable the city’s business taxes and to privatize some public services.

But although he had difficulty working within the government, Riordan excelled at finding ways around it, principally by mobilizing wealthy acquaintances and friends.

The multimillionaire lawyer and venture capitalist persuaded supporters to give millions of dollars to improve police technology, rewrite the city’s charter, topple a Los Angeles school board, and finance the Disney Concert Hall downtown when others had predicted it was a lost cause. In so doing, he changed Los Angeles and revived, at least temporarily, a dormant civic culture of noblesse oblige.

Although he left office last year, Riordan’s effectiveness as mayor and his record in business are now at issue as he makes a bid to become the Republican nominee for governor of California. At 71, he is running on the same theme that he used in his first campaign for mayor, only this time he is saying that he is “tough enough to turn California around.”

Even Riordan’s critics say he lent a smart and fearless spirit to Los Angeles as it recovered from rioting and, not long afterward, from the costliest earthquake in U.S. history. Many say he improved local government efficiency and the degree to which the city was perceived as business-friendly.

But his effectiveness was sharply limited--according to dozens of political friends, adversaries and academics--by a generally short attention span, a lack of first-rate communications skills, a lack of experience as a high-level manager and an attitude toward government workers and others that many took to be arrogant. He did little, advocates say, for neighborhoods, housing or parks.

“His great strength was that he could think outside the box about government,” said Cal State Fullerton political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, who studies the politics of Los Angeles. “His great weakness was that he didn’t really like the government. It’s hard to lead a body you don’t respect.”

Riordan declined through his campaign staff to be interviewed for this article.

Taking Charge After ’94 Quake

Riordan’s performance as mayor was circumscribed by national trends, natural disasters and other events over which he had little control.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city was rocked by recession, crime waves, one police brutality scandal after another and, climactically, widespread rioting.

All that seemed to be left was a major earthquake, and the city got one six months into Riordan’s first term on Jan. 17, 1994. He responded with what friends and foes regarded as a bravura performance.

An hour or so after the 6.7 magnitude Northridge quake struck at 4:30 a.m. he was at the city’s bunker-like emergency command center, ahead of the police chief, leading by example. He ordered food for city workers from a 24-hour restaurant he owns, the Original Pantry, and projected a reassuring, avuncular presence.

Riordan was a “horizon thinker,” said Robin Kramer, the longest-tenured of his five chiefs of staff. In this case, Riordan foresaw a likelihood of increased panic as lenders foreclosed on borrowers with damaged properties. He set out to lobby the controller of the currency, who sat atop the banks’ regulatory food chain, to make sure banks were told to ease up.

Riordan and the city benefited from a personal relationship with President Clinton, who had his own political reasons to help Los Angeles in the hope that it would help him carry California in 1996. The Riordan-Clinton relationship was brokered by William Wardlaw, the hands-on chairman of Clinton’s 1992 California drive, who was Riordan’s closest friend and longtime business associate. Throughout most of Riordan’s time in office, Wardlaw would serve as a sort of shadow advisor, helping guide the administration’s political direction from the sidelines and continually intervening with the White House.

The federal response to Los Angeles’ needs after the earthquake was “amazing,” said Keith Comrie, a die-hard Riordan critic who was the city’s chief administrative officer at the time. After a disastrous hurricane, Florida had people living in tents and trailers for a year, but Clinton cabinet members arrived in Los Angeles with the power to move quickly. “We had [displaced] people out of the parks and into housing within a few weeks,” Comrie said.

While recovering rapidly from the quake, most Los Angeles residents also began to benefit from what became the longest national peacetime economic expansion on record.

The city itself was far from transformed. The gap between rich and poor widened in the boom, according to figures compiled by the Milken Institute.

But unemployment declined and tax revenues swelled, eventually enabling Riordan to increase spending for the kind of quality-of-life services that were marginalized in harder times. Tree trimming, street resurfacing and the hours that local libraries and park facilities were open all increased.

There was also a precipitous fall in crime. Riordan had made reducing crime his top priority and, in pursuit of it, expanded the police force. He fell short of his principal campaign promise to boost LAPD ranks by 3,000 officers in four years. Relying in part on Clinton administration grants, he was able to add 2,200 officers.

But a third of that gain eroded as departures outpaced recruitments in a department plagued by sagging morale.

How much of the drop in crime was the result of the police buildup remains an unanswerable question. For six of Riordan’s eight years in office, the drop in Los Angeles exceeded that in most big cities, although New York experienced even more dramatic declines.

Near the end of his tenure, homicides and other violent crimes leveled off nationwide. They started to creep back up in Los Angeles.

Handling of Rampart Scandal Criticized

Although Riordan focused on expanding the size of the LAPD, he did little to strengthen civilian oversight over a department that for years had resisted it--a noteworthy omission in a city that had experienced two riots linked to police misconduct in 30 years.

When the Rampart scandal--with its allegations of rogue officers shooting innocent people, framing suspects and lying--broke in 1999, some civic and City Council leaders thought they could not trust the police to get to the bottom of it. They proposed impaneling an independent commission with authority to issue subpoenas and grant administrative immunity to officers who had seen wrongdoing but had not come forward.

Riordan resisted. He wanted to leave the investigation and the disciplinary decisions to a manager he had selected--Bernard C. Parks, the police chief he appointed in 1997, who opposed granting immunity. In Parks, Riordan believed he had a worthy manager, associates said.

When Parks and the LAPD produced their own internal examination of the Rampart scandal, Riordan’s first response was to back the LAPD’s version of events. At a contentious news conference, he called the report the best self-examination by a public agency “in the history of mankind.”

Then, in answer to a question, Riordan acknowledged that he had not finished reading it.

Among those who were not willing to trust Riordan and the LAPD to address police misconduct under such circumstances were attorneys in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. They had been investigating the LAPD for several years and were familiar with the department’s failure to adopt some of the reforms urged by the Christopher Commission, impaneled in 1991 after the Rodney King beating and charged with making recommendations to deter use of excessive force.

Nearly a decade after that report, Civil Rights Division lawyers formally notified city leaders that they were prepared to sue the city government for tolerating a pattern of misconduct by a minority of police in Rampart and elsewhere. The Justice Department said it could prove that officers used excessive force, made false arrests and undertook unreasonable searches--and that management had failed to stop them.

Justice Department lawyers said the only way for the city to avoid being sued was to sign an agreement to implement reforms, under the supervision of a federal judge who could hold leaders in contempt of court if they balked.

Joined by Parks, Riordan tried to make an end run around the Civil Rights Division attorneys, aides said, lobbying Congress and the White House in an attempt to bring pressure on Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to call them off. Some advisors to the mayor cautioned that such a course was a waste of time and energy, but he pursued it anyway for months, only to fail. In the end, he signed the consent decree.

Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice, whom Riordan appointed as a water and power commissioner, said Riordan had many good qualities. “With all of his heart he has a civic morality. He feels a duty of the rich to contribute, not just sit in their gated communities and let the city rot.” But, she said, he had no feel for police reform.

Many Called Mayor’s Attitude Arrogant

A defining aspect of Riordan’s mayoralty was his low regard for the City Council. He angered some members by the way he introduced himself politically: sponsoring an initiative to limit local office-holders, including council members, to two terms.

Intimates said Riordan respected only one of the council’s 15 members. That was the late Council President John Ferraro, who, like Riordan, had been a millionaire businessman before turning to public life.

The disregard was mutual. “Hate’s a good word” for the way some council members felt about him, said former Councilman Rudy Svorinich, a gregarious former paint store owner who felt he and Riordan had good rapport.

One problem was that many saw Riordan’s prevailing attitude as arrogance.

Lesa Slaughter, the shortest-tenured of his chiefs of staff, described it as “I’m right. Therefore, I don’t care what you think of me.”

Another was Riordan’s reluctance to make public his intentions until the last moment. “All most people on the council wanted was a little respect, an answer to questions like, ‘What’s in the budget?’ ” said Xandra Kayden, a senior fellow at UCLA’s school of public policy.

A costly distrust developed, said the council’s chief legislative analyst, Ronald Deaton, a frequent Riordan adversary. “He lost the ability to put forth a program and have the program reviewed on its merits.”

Frustrated by having to share power with the council, Riordan pushed to change the rules of city government through a new City Charter that would limit the council’s power and create a stronger mayor.

He wanted, for instance, to make department heads exclusively accountable to the mayor--not to both the mayor and the City Council. He also wanted the mayor to have the power to appoint his own city attorney for civil matters.

Critics thought he was being petulant. “It was kind of like, I can’t play by the rules and win, so I’ll change the rules,” said John Perez, a Riordan-appointed human relations commissioner, United Food and Commercial Workers Union leader and Democratic activist.

Riordan argued that his real mission was government efficiency.

As he pursued the City Charter overhaul, money was no object. He contributed more than $500,000 and solicited donations from friends for more than a million more.

Their money went to fund a petition drive and back a slate of candidates for a charter revision commission.

The first round of that process was a setback for Riordan. Most of the candidates he backed lost to a rival slate endorsed by the only other well-funded group that cared much about city government--the city employee unions.

The unions cared mainly about preserving civil service job protections. Riordan would have preferred to scrap them, aides said. But, in a strategic concession that would shape the rest of the debate, he agreed not to challenge them as a way of giving himself a chance to win over charter commissioners on the issue he cared about most--more mayoral power.

As key votes approached, Riordan coaxed and threatened. The chairman of the elected charter commission, USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, said two members with ambitions of being elected to City Council told him that Riordan promised to endorse them and in one case provide funds. He said a third member told him that a Riordan associate pressured him through his employer.

Still, Riordan was forced to compromise. He was outmaneuvered by some other officials, most notably then-City Atty. James K. Hahn, who beat back Riordan’s effort to split his office in two.

Riordan nevertheless emerged with a significant increase in mayoral authority in a new proposed charter, the first significant rewriting of city rules in generations. Voters approved it after yet another campaign--again backed financially by Riordan and his wealthy supporters.

Riordan’s Wealth Gave Him Free Rein

What voters seemed to enjoy most about Riordan was the way he made it plain that he did not need their money. Just about everyone questioned in political focus groups knew one thing about him: As mayor, he turned down the city’s $173,000-a-year salary and took just $1 a year.

He could afford to do things his way. By the time he ran for mayor, he had turned an inheritance of less than $100,000 into a fortune of more than $100 million, which he then, to limit possible conflicts of interest, placed into what he said was a blind trust.

As mayor, he styled himself as a populist who was primarily interested in helping the poor. But his investments over the years showed continuing tension between efforts to help the poor and pursuit of profits that sometimes hurt them.

Riordan’s first big scores were stock purchases. He invested in Syntex, a small pharmaceutical company that came up with the world’s first birth control pill shortly after he bought in. Later, he hit what he called his “home run,” multiplying his investment nearly 300 times, with a company called Convergent Technologies that pioneered “intelligent” computer workstations made possible by the advent of small computer chips.

Early in the 1980s, Riordan bought three apartment buildings near his Pantry restaurant at 9th and Figueroa and evicted all of the low-income tenants so the buildings could be razed and replaced with offices.

A Times analysis of eight of his biggest deals in the 1980s--all but one a leveraged buyout--showed that he made an overall profit of $74 million. As companies were loaded with debt, bought and sold, thousands lost jobs. Collectively, however, the deals resulted in a net gain of 14 jobs.

Asked by business writer L.J. Davis in 1988 how he could justify “flipping companies like cards,” Riordan answered, “Greed. Eventually, you have to get your money out.”

He added: “I’m taking lessons in learning how to wave to the poor people.” Asked about the remarks years later, Riordan said they were failed attempts at humor, taken out of context and inconsistent with his commitment to social justice.

Interested in using his money to support philanthropy, Riordan created the Riordan Foundation in the early 1980s. It has since given out more than $30 million in grants to pay for computer-assisted literacy programs for elementary schools and and other programs that serve youth.

Riordan’s compassion for the poor sometimes collided with his sense of what was good public policy for Los Angeles.

On the matter of requiring city contractors to pay a wage significantly above the state minimum, for instance, Riordan said it was immoral for businesses not to pay a “living wage” and noted that he paid unionized workers at his restaurant salaries higher than would have been required by the proposed living wage ordinance.

But he vetoed the proposal, saying it would have been bad for business.

The council overrode him.

Business Climate Improved Overall

Riordan didn’t work miracles in attracting businesses to Los Angeles. External forces such as mergers continued the exodus of Fortune 500 companies that were headquartered in the city. The chamber of commerce says there are now three left. And the city continued to lose manufacturing jobs and gain service jobs, which tend to be lower paying.

But Riordan improved both the city’s overall business climate and some of the ways in which city government related to private firms, economists and business people say.

Carol Schatz, who heads a business lobbying group called the Central City Assn. and served as a Riordan appointee on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that putting a business-friendly face on the city was “the critical value of his mayoralty.”

Economist Jack Kyser of the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. lauded Riordan for starting a “business team” in the mayor’s office designed to help firms solve their problems and get them to remain in or relocate to Los Angeles.

Critics say that Riordan and his team operated without a clear economic development strategy and used public subsidies unwisely to help attract mainly retailers with low-paying jobs.

But Kyser said it was a move in the right direction. “It’s like you had a car and the thing was in reverse and I think Riordan got it moving forward again at a pretty good speed. It may not have gone down quite the roads that people wanted, but at least you had positive momentum.”

As a candidate, Riordan portrayed city government as in need of a “management revolution.” He advocated privatizing an array of city services, but city employee unions and others checked him.

Julie Butcher, general manager of the Service Employees International Union Local 347, which represented many of the threatened workers, said that to fight off privatization, workers created greater efficiencies themselves.

“If he’d had any attention span or been more competent, we wouldn’t have been able to beat him,” she said.

Riordan had no substantial management experience himself. As a businessman, he was an investor who bet on the ability of others to run companies--and, in fact, his choices of general managers for city departments generally received high marks around City Hall.

But in seeking the mayor’s office, he made what some considered a rookie manager’s mistake, calling workers in an organization he was about to head “brain-dead.” Once ensconced in City Hall, he would not let them forget it. William Fujioka, the city’s personnel director and later its chief administrative officer, said the mayor and his staff repeatedly observed “that if they [city workers] were smart, they wouldn’t be working for the city.”

Mixed Reaction to Efforts on Schools

Especially in his second term, Riordan became a fierce and outspoken critic of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which he blamed for failing to give children the education they deserved.

Although Riordan had no formal authority over schools, he did not let that stop him. He and his wealthy backers raised millions of dollars for insurgent school board candidates. They won, installing a new board majority that promised to shake up the management of L.A. Unified.

While some credited Riordan for finally channeling public discontent with local schools into political actions, others were less impressed. Listening to the mayor tout this as the most significant achievement of his mayoralty, San Fernando Valley secession advocate Richard Close remembered feeling disappointed.

“It underscored how little he’d accomplished as mayor,” said Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. and chairman of the secession group, Valley VOTE. “He could have written those checks without serving one day as mayor.”

Close faulted Riordan for a weak commitment to improving average people’s lives in their neighborhoods.

Kelly Martin, Riordan’s last chief of staff, defended his record in the neighborhoods, saying the mayor put significant effort into cleaning up graffiti and closing alleys that were magnets for crime and illegal dumping.

A large part of Riordan’s neighborhood revitalization efforts involved taking money that had been traditionally used for subsidized housing and redirecting it to selected neighborhoods where council members and neighborhood people could jointly decide how to spend it.

Jan Breidenbach, director of the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing, said she fought the diversions, usually unsuccessfully. “In terms of [subsidized] housing, he didn’t do anything really,” she said of Riordan.

Nor did Riordan spend all of the federal anti-poverty funds that were available to him. When he left office, more than $200 million in federal grants remained unspent. Riordan aides attributed that to bureaucratic delays, but USC political science professor Michael Preston said he found Riordan’s failure to spend the money “very disturbing. . . . If you look at neighborhood revitalization, there are no positive marks I can give him.”

As Riordan’s time in office wound down, he launched a quixotic campaign on behalf of neighborhoods. It showcased the high-minded sense of purpose that he said had brought him to public life--a desire to save a city in distress. But, for some, it also highlighted how much he had left undone.

It began when, by happenstance, the mayor was approached by a woman at a community meeting who complained that her neighborhood park, Vermont Square, was a crime magnet. Her daughter had been shot there.

Riordan, who lost two children of his own, was touched, and he vowed on the spot to clean that park within two weeks.

Riordan then spun that notion forward into a short-lived but ambitious program--to fix up one city park every two weeks for the rest of his time in office. He himself showed up in Vermont Square to help repaint a graffitied gazebo.

Riordan took pride in the effort, but parks advocate Robert Garcia saw it as too little, too late. As director of a project at the Center for Law in the Public Interest that focuses on equal access to the parks for the poor, Garcia said he had been talking to Riordan for years about the bad shape of parks in poor areas, without much effect.

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Top Contributors to Riordan Campaign

City/State Contributions

A. Jerrold Perenchio Los Angeles $500,000

Calif. Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers Sacramento $250,000

Siebel Systems Inc. San Mateo $200,000

Siebel Living Trust San Mateo $200,000

Alex Spanos Stockton $125,290

Keith R. Murdoch Los Angeles $125,000

Mark C. Johnson Santa Ana $117,635

Marvin Davis Los Angeles $107,850

Robert Day Los Angeles $100,960