Hahn Plots His Course for Rest of Term

Midway through his term, Mayor James K. Hahn finds himself a bit bewildered.

Friends on the City Council deserted him in a recent budget fight. His push to expand the police force is stalled. A man known as the mildest of big-city mayors is suddenly being called a wheeler-dealer, a poor loser, a bully.

Sitting in his spacious third-floor City Hall office, a sign on his desk reading “The Buck Stops Here,” Hahn talked in an interview last week about the wrenching confrontations of his first two years in office and seemed hopeful that the next two will be quieter.

His priorities, he said, are curbing crime and making steady (even if unspectacular) progress in shortening the time it takes to fix potholes or rid neighborhoods of lingering nuisances.

“If you’re looking for the big, new, dramatic initiative,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you that that’s what I have in mind.”

A bit unnerved still by the defeat of his budget, Hahn proudly ticked off his victories to date and appeared confident that he will be reelected in 2005. The secession movement was beaten so soundly last year, he said, that he predicts it will be “difficult for people to get it going again.”

And though it strained his rapport with the African American supporters who are the heart of the Hahn family’s political base, he said he has rejuvenated the Los Angeles Police Department by ousting Bernard C. Parks and installing William J. Bratton as chief.

“I knew it would be painful for me politically and I knew there was no way to avoid that pain,” Hahn said, balancing himself on the edge of an easy chair in the sitting area of an office whose shelves hold biographies of Democratic Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Harry S. Truman. “But if I was going to really make progress toward my goal of making this a safer city, it was clear we needed to go in a new direction at LAPD.”

A week after his proposed budget was scuttled by the City Council, Hahn is rethinking his approach with the lawmakers. He is planning lunches with council members to repair friendships and asking himself whether he misjudged the level of support for his policy thrusts.

“I was caught pretty much off-guard by this,” the mayor said.

As he begins the second half of his term, Hahn said he is still learning the limits of power and the culture of City Hall. It is fair for the mayor to absorb criticism, Hahn said, but when he sought to strike back in the dust-up with the council, it resulted in a backlash that, to the mayor, smacked of a “double standard.”

“I’m going to continue to be the punching bag a lot of times,” he said. “I guess the next time, before I punch back, I’ll just count to 10.”

Hahn had put forward a 2003-04 budget that he considered benign by the standards of today’s rocky financial climate. No layoffs. No tax hikes. No dramatic cuts in services.

Yet, instead of waving it through, a City Council that the mayor believed to be stacked with friends and ideological allies spurned his plan to add hundreds more police officers out of concern for projected shortfalls, overrode his veto and turned a six-week budget debate into a referendum on his leadership style.

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Puzzlement

“I don’t know what really happened this time,” the mayor said. “I’m certainly not a guy who’s trying to take credit on everything. I’m not trying to be Rudy Giuliani here in Los Angeles. I’m just interested in results. I thought they were interested in results too.”

Some longtime aides are quietly suggesting a new legislative approach, one that relies not so much on the fragile loyalty of council President Alex Padilla -- who abandoned the mayor in the budget fight -- but on more enduring council coalitions.

The mayor’s office is sold on the idea, though all Hahn will offer is a diplomatic “Interesting suggestion.”

Hahn isn’t expecting an easy time of it. In an era of term limits, he says, it is tough for a mayor to assemble the durable majorities that one predecessor, Tom Bradley, could so readily muster.

“When Mayor Bradley was here, he could depend on a coalition of nine or 10 votes on almost any issue,” Hahn said. “They were solidly with Tom Bradley, and he built that coalition. Of course, he was in office 20 years.”

Today, in contrast, “from issue to issue, there’s a different eight votes down there in the City Council, and sometimes I don’t have my own sister [Councilwoman Janice Hahn] with me.”

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Council Excluded?

For some council members, the budget fight capped two years of rising frustration over what they see as an independent mayoral style that left them excluded.

Hahn, in turn, said the resistance to his policy initiatives has been driven in part by internal council politics. Padilla faces a challenge for the council presidency from Councilwoman Wendy Greuel. In the context of that race, Hahn said, it has been risky for either of them to side with the mayor in such a well-publicized showdown.

“Both [Greuel and Padilla] were certainly cognizant of the way this was being cast,” Hahn said. “It was being cast, true or not, as the council versus the mayor. And if you want to be the leader of the council, then you want to be on the side of the council.”

Hahn hopes to mend ties in coming weeks, in part through the series of get-togethers.

“I thought I was on the right track. Obviously, I need to reassess that, because I thought they were happy with growth in the Police Department, reduction in crime, neighborhood government. I’ll have to just spend more time on it than I have.”

Yet some wonder if the mayor is sincere. When a plane crashed into an apartment building in the Fairfax district on June 6, Councilman Jack Weiss, who represents the area, spent hours at the scene. But Weiss, an outspoken opponent of the mayor’s budget, was not invited to a Hollywood fire station four days later when Hahn went out to thank firefighters who responded to the crash, which set the building ablaze.

The mayor instead shook the hands of firefighters in the company of Councilman Tom LaBonge, a supporter on the budget whose district includes the station.

“Do I think it’s a coincidence? No,” said Lisa Hansen, a spokeswoman for Weiss.

Matt Middlebrook, a spokesman for Hahn, said the event had not been set up by the mayor’s office. In any case, he said, “we consistently invite Councilman Weiss to press conferences and he routinely turns them down.”

Another councilman who may need extra attention is Parks. The former police chief won election to the City Council in March. His relationship with the mayor was further strained when Hahn went out of his way in a radio interview during the budget debate to demean Parks’ leadership at the LAPD.

That episode reinforced a lesson Hahn said he is learning as mayor: You can’t fight back.

“I guess one of the things I need to learn is when people are critical of me, that’s fair. But if I fire back, that’s unfair. I’m trying to learn that double standard more and more here. What I have to resist is, if someone takes a million shots at me, they get to take a million and one.”

Though the next mayoral election is still two years away, Hahn has begun to prepare.

He said he knows of no major opponents so far. Antonio Villaraigosa, Hahn’s foe in the 2001 mayor’s race, is joining the City Council and has told him he won’t run, the mayor said.

As for Parks, “He seems to be very focused on being a councilman right now.”

The record Hahn will promote is one of safer streets and advances in city services. His hope, he said, is for residents to think: “Hey, you know what? I’ve been noticing stuff. City government does seem to be doing its job better. Looking around, the streets seem cleaner. Crime is going down. Things are getting fixed.

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Potholes a Measure

“Sure, you’ll always find potholes in the city, but how long they stay there is a measure of how well we’re doing.”

A reserved sort with no special appetite for the public stage, Hahn concedes that he is being “recognized more” as he travels throughout the city, but says he is not being seduced by the attention.

“For me, it’s important to keep the balance,” the mayor said. “I think you’re a better public official if you can stay real and as normal as you can be in this abnormal environment.

“It is this ‘elected official-itis’ you see a lot of people get. It’s very annoying.”

He added: “Some people want the mayor to be this larger-than-life figure that dominates the political landscape of the city.”

He held up a copy of the Daily News, with a front-page headline about the falling murder rate.

“I like seeing that headline,” he said. “You don’t see my name in that headline, but I got a bigger kick out of that headline than if my name had been in it.”