Hahn’s Pothole Strategy

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn is trying to buy enough Pothole Killers, asphalt-toting trucks that fill street crevices twice as quickly as a two-person crew, to patch every city pothole within hours of a complaint.

He’s dispatched white-gloved traffic officers to Ventura Boulevard, launched monthly “Meet the Mayor” sessions with constituents and invited Blake Nordstrom, president of the department store known for its attentive salespeople, to lecture the city’s general managers on how to treat customers.

“Sometimes bureaucrats think the customer is the rule book, the customer is the regulation, instead of realizing these are real people and real businesses that need our help,” he said in January. “We want customers who are going to rave about us, who are going to love us, and that’s how we’re going to keep everybody in this city.”

For Hahn, however, that philosophy--inherited partly from his father, late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn--has met its test in the campaigns for secession by Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Those breakaway movements will be on the ballot Nov. 5, and some question whether there is time for Hahn’s approach, which he sees as the city’s best defense against breakup, to register in a city as large as Los Angeles.

“People have only intermittent contact with city government,” said UC San Diego political scientist Steve Erie, who studies Los Angeles politics. “The question is, are they going to notice the difference?”

To be effective, according to secession supporters and others, Hahn’s devotion to detail should be part of a larger, more inspiring vision for the city. Making constituents happy, they say, might work over the long haul but not quickly enough to affect the outcome of the secession debate.

“I don’t think sticking a couple cops on the corners is going to make a difference,” said J. Richard Leyner, a commercial real estate executive who is on the board of Valley VOTE, a pro-secession organization. “The kinds of things we want taken care of, they can’t be done in the next five months.”

Hahn, who also is raising money and helping orchestrate the political campaign against secession, said he does not harbor any illusions that his administration can effect enough change before election day to satisfy every discontented resident.

“The difficulty you have is one year versus however many years people have been steamed up about something,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to change everybody’s minds, but we’re going to hammer this point home: The things you are mad about, we’re working on.”

To that end, the mayor has made customer service a priority during his first year in office. The Department of Building and Safety has issued a money-back guarantee promising that people seeking permits for construction improvements will be helped within an hour. The Department of Transportation has made improvements at 25 intersections identified as the worst in the city, and is working on another 25.

In September, the biggest of the customer-service initiatives is expected to debut, when the city opens a new 311 call center. Operators will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to provide basic information about city services and connect callers to departments for assistance.

Last Thursday, Hahn met individually with 20 residents at the Van Nuys City Hall, the first of what he promises will be monthly sessions with his constituents. Those residents were randomly selected from 136 people who asked for time with the mayor.

Electrician Gilbert Monteverde drove up from Wilmington to complain to Hahn about broken sidewalks along his street. Monteverde’s neighbor Michael Duncan, who uses a wheelchair, once got stuck for an hour on the uneven concrete.

“When he goes to the park, he has to travel on the street, which is a real hazard,” Monteverde told the mayor.

“We’ve got to fix it,” said Hahn, as he shuffled through photos of the sidewalk cracks Monteverde brought with him. A crew would be out shortly, he said.

Later, Monteverde said that after three frustrating months of not being able to get through to anyone in the city, it was refreshing to be able to talk to the mayor himself.

“It’s an open-door policy that gives us an opportunity to speak our minds,” he said. “I think it’s great.”

Hahn’s commitment to personal service is in part a legacy of his father, who held office in Los Angeles for decades.

When he was a city councilman, Kenneth Hahn once got a phone call from a woman whose garbage had not been picked up, the mayor recounted in a recent interview. So the city councilman drove to her house, picked up the trash and took it to the dump.

“His theory, which was the right one, was that this lady will tell everybody on the street, ‘The city councilman himself came out to pick up my trash,’ ” the mayor said.

If residents don’t have faith that their garbage will be picked up and their trees trimmed, they will not rally around broader goals for the city, the mayor said.

“It’s not the end-all and be-all, but if you don’t get the nuts and bolts of government done right, the other stuff is very difficult to achieve,” Hahn said.

So Hahn has tried to tend to the basics: He launched two information vans to drive around the city with resources for the elderly; assigned members of his business team to hold office hours in the Valley once a week; and attempted to eliminate the city’s backlog of outstanding bills.

“The city had a reputation for being slow-paying, and it seems to be changing,” said Steve Panagetopulos, the owner of Ferdman Engraving, which received $5,402 in overdue payments last winter. “Now I know I don’t have to go chasing my money all the time.”

Aides to Hahn argue that voters care more about their services than about a mayor who inspires them in speeches.

“If you talk to people about what’s right and wrong with the city, people aren’t going to say, ‘We don’t have a grand enough vision about such and such,’ ” said Deputy Mayor Matt Middlebrook. “They’re probably going to reflect on a personal anecdote, like a broken curb or clean streets.”

Despite critics who say that Hahn’s approach might work if given years, rather than five months, his determination to address secession as a customer-service problem is applauded by some business and labor leaders, who believe changing the city’s reputation will give secessionists less firepower.

“That’s the change that needs to happen in the city,” said Julie Butcher, general manager of SEIU Local 347, the largest city employee union. “Every city worker needs to understand that their job is to serve the public, in every way.”

But others say Hahn’s push for customer service may be too narrow to move the electorate this fall.

“Over time it might have an effect, but it doesn’t grab the imagination,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Hahn’s most powerful weapon may be not only delivering what residents expect, but inspiring them about what the city can ultimately become, some experts said.

“You have to be both a manager and a leader in these tough situations,” said Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis who is now a professor of public management at Harvard University. “Mayors, particularly in times of crises, are both symbols of the community’s spirit and are cheerleaders for that.”

But some irritated residents have tired of waiting.

“I think the mayor came into this when the movement was a little too far gone,” said Granada Hills resident Kim Thompson, who is planning on running for city council in the new Valley city. “It’s too little, too late.”