Festering Council-Mayor Tensions Erupt Into Open

In July 2001, incoming Mayor James K. Hahn stood on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall and promised to forge a better relationship with the City Council than that of his predecessor, Richard Riordan.

“As mayor, I’m not going to head an isolated, separate branch of government,” Hahn said on the muggy summer morning of his inauguration. “I will listen to the city’s elected officials because they, too, speak for the people.”

Two years later, strife between the mayor and the council has spilled out into the open, culminating in a sharp split over next year’s budget. Council President Alex Padilla and Councilman Nick Pacheco, two of Hahn’s most loyal allies, voted against the mayor again Wednesday and called his financial plan irresponsible. At one point the mayor’s sister, Councilwoman Janice Hahn, suggested that he and the council needed marriage counseling.

Hahn’s failure to persuade the council to back his budget reflected more than a difference in approach to the city’s finances, several council members said. The chasm between the mayor and the council came about after months of discontent among council members, many of whom complain that they have felt marginalized and excluded by the Hahn administration.

“It’s been common knowledge inside City Hall that the relationship between the mayor’s office and the council offices has not been running smoothly for the last year or so,” Pacheco said Thursday.

After the council’s vote Wednesday to override Hahn on the expansion of the Police Department -- resisting weeks of political pressure from the mayor and the police chief -- some analysts say Hahn must now recalibrate his approach toward the 15-member body in order to advance his agenda at City Hall.

For Hahn to ignore the council, or to assume that it will offer unquestioned support for his goals, is the sort of mistake that Gov. Gray Davis made in his first term when he announced that the role of the Legislature was to implement his vision, said political consultant Harvey Englander.

Hahn “and his staff have to really understand that the way to get anything done is to be inclusive of the council rather than giving them marching orders or telling them, ‘This is what I want to do,’ ” Englander said.

Hahn rejected suggestions that his defeat over the budget underscored deeper tensions with the City Council. He portrayed the vote as an isolated setback -- one of the inevitable “bumps in the road” -- and predicted that he and the council would forge agreements in the future.

“Can’t make everybody happy all the time,” the mayor said Thursday morning at a downtown event to raise money for the city firefighters’ widows and orphans fund. “But we continually work closely with the council, and we did this year. That’s how we were able to move forward.

“I don’t know what the frustrations are about,” he added. “Guess you have to ask the council.... But I think we’re in good shape.”

Some council members echoed his sentiment,

“This is one city,” said Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who consistently opposed Hahn’s budget. “Today’s most arch-opponent is tomorrow’s person that you need desperately. That’s the way of politics.”

Hahn’s aides tried to cast this week’s budget vote as a success for the mayor, who can argue to the public that he fought to expand the Police Department by 320 officers despite the council’s objections.

Robin Kramer, a former chief of staff to Riordan, agreed that Hahn may yet emerge a winner in the budget debacle.

If crime is up when the 2005 reelection campaign rolls around, she said, Hahn “will be able to make a convincing case, a political case, an electoral case, that he fought” fiercely to hire more officers.

But some analysts said Hahn’s inability to rally council members to his side indicates a weakness in his administration.

“Whether you agree or disagree with Mayor Hahn, it’s incredibly important for a city to have a mayor who sets the agenda,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

For most of his term, Hahn had moved his program through the council with little resistance. But his legislative successes masked an underlying resentment from council members who said they’ve felt pushed aside -- excluded from major decisions, rarely consulted, expected to pass the mayor’s initiatives without questions.

Many of the complaints center on Hahn’s staff, which council members and political observers say is ill-equipped for the diplomatic requirements at City Hall.

“They have completely isolated this mayor,” said a Hahn friend who expressed dismay at how the budget debate was handled. “This is not the way it was supposed to go, and it’s frustrating.”

Deputy Mayor Matt Middlebrook dismissed criticism of the mayor’s staff.

“This was a substantive disagreement on the budget,” he said. “It would certainly be unfortunate if decisions were made not to hire more police officers because someone didn’t like someone’s tone of voice.”

But the dissatisfaction with the mayor’s staff is so prevalent that it is openly discussed among the council. On Wednesday evening, after Hahn lost the veto vote, his sister quipped, “We’re taking up a fund to send the mayor’s staff to the seminar ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ ”

The council’s discontent would have surfaced earlier, several members said, had city officials not had to present a unified front to beat back two secession efforts last year.

“That’s not the time when you start airing your dirty laundry,” Pacheco said.

After the secession efforts failed, fissures began to appear.

In January, Padilla and Councilwoman Wendy Greuel complained that Hahn’s distribution of federal anti-poverty funds was unfair and left out their San Fernando Valley districts.

In March, Janice Hahn criticized the administration for excluding council offices in devising a new plan to improve city services.

The budget battle turned particularly acrimonious.

When city analysts released reports predicting a $280-million shortfall, members of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee pressed Hahn’s office to explain the numbers. But his aides would simply say the forecasts were likely to change.

That answer did not sit well with the council members, who warned that they could not approve increased spending without more confidence in the city’s finances. In the end, 11 members voted against Hahn’s plan.

Some council members who had not previously felt sidelined by the mayor’s office said they were startled by the way he had treated his longtime allies during the budget debate.

After Councilman Eric Garcetti, a consistent supporter of the mayor, voted against the immediate police expansion, Hahn passed him over for a post Garcetti wanted on a regional air quality board.

Garcetti said he is not sure what the budget showdown bodes for the power balance at City Hall.

“It takes longer to rebuild relationships than it takes to break them,” he said. “There are a lot of people who would welcome the mayor demonstrating both that he has ideas of where the city should go and knows how to work as part of a team to get there.”

Councilman Ed Reyes said that with the budget passed, the council and the mayor should “agree to disagree.”

“We can’t waste time getting caught up in the kind of politics that doesn’t allow us to work as a team,” Reyes said, “because our communities can’t afford it.”