Hertzberg, Hahn Swap Criticisms

Mayor James K. Hahn and former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg traded charges Thursday of government mismanagement, parrying over their records in office as the debate between the two mayoral rivals intensified.

Meanwhile, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa began running his first television commercial of the campaign, a 30-second spot that traces his trajectory from the son of a single mother to speaker of the California Assembly and city councilman.

Villaraigosa is the last of the five top mayoral candidates to join the television ad wars, airing his first spot just 19 days before the March 8 election. Campaign manager Ace Smith said Villaraigosa was spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to run the ad, but he would not specify how much.

The mayoral hopefuls popped up throughout the city Thursday in a series of events. Villaraigosa was at City Hall, where he announced a proposal to broadcast information about the city’s 4,000 registered sex offenders on television. State Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) pitched his plan to create middle-class jobs to the Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce. Later, Hahn’s four major challengers participated in a debate at Loyola Marymount University.

But the dispute between the mayor and Hertzberg dominated the day.

Hertzberg began the back-and-forth by proposing to triple the city budget for performance audits to find waste and inefficiency, noting that City Controller Laura Chick’s audits identified $45 million in waste and potential cuts last year. He argued that such savings could easily finance an increase in the auditing budget to $3 million.

“I think the new audits will uncover more examples of waste, duplication, inefficiency and mismanagement,” he said, standing outside the city Department of Water and Power, which has come under fire for spending millions of dollars on public relations contracts. “As mayor, I will implement her recommendations in my budget, instead of fighting her in the press, as Jim Hahn does.”

Chick -- who withdrew her endorsement of Hahn last year but has not endorsed any of his rivals -- has clashed frequently with the mayor in recent months over her criticisms of his administration.

Hertzberg pounced on a series of questionable costs identified in past audits, including $1 million pledged by the city to rent three golden monkeys from China for the Los Angeles Zoo, $1.9 million for faulty hand-held computer devices for police officers, $15.7 million for DWP public relations and $43 million for trash trucks with mechanical problems that cause random stops and starts.

He pledged to use at least 25% of the money saved through audits to hire more police officers, reiterating his opposition to raising sales taxes to pay for more officers.

“City Hall under Jim Hahn is just not working,” he said. “He still wants to raise taxes to pay for his broken promises. The people of Los Angeles pay enough taxes.”

Hahn fired back, accusing the former Assembly speaker of squandering taxpayer money during California’s energy crisis.

“The real waste was up in Sacramento when Bob Hertzberg along with other people were responsible for bringing one of the biggest energy crisis situations we’d seen in this state, and then managed to turn a huge state surplus into a huge state deficit in the way they mismanaged that energy crisis,” Hahn told reporters during a visit to a riverbank in Atwater Village to warn about the dangers posed by raging flood channels in a rainstorm.

“So he is the last person that I want to hear talking about how we improve efficiency at DWP,” Hahn said.

Hertzberg, who was endorsed Thursday by California Controller Steve Westly, defended himself by saying that he played a role in cutting state spending by $2 billion, and added that an assemblyman and a mayor have different budget powers.

“There is a big difference between being one of 120 [legislators] and being the CEO. The buck stops at the mayor’s office, and he sets the charge,” he said. “I wasn’t the governor.”

The testy exchange continued by proxy when Hertzberg appeared on the KCRW-FM (89.9) radio program “Which Way L.A.” and was told by host Warren Olney about Hahn’s counterattack.

“It’s typical Jim Hahn. He is always trying to obfuscate the issue,” Hertzberg said. “Jim Hahn is trying to blame everybody else for his own failures.”

The rivals’ escalating war of words has begun to dominate a race viewed as volatile by most political analysts.

Though the candidates have yet to attack each other directly in television or radio commercials, their campaign strategists are bracing for a negative turn in the race. For his part, Hahn said Thursday that he was “always ready to respond if somebody wants to go on the attack.”

Hahn did not attend a Thursday night forum hosted by Loyola Marymount’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles, where the candidates were quizzed about education, transportation and other local issues. Villaraigosa scolded the incumbent for his absence, calling it “absolutely disrespectful.”

Hahn has attended fewer debates than his challengers.

Villaraigosa’s television spot shows the councilman talking with families, workers and schoolchildren in a montage of images, touting his efforts to expand healthcare and organize neighborhood cleanups. In one clip, he walks with his high school teacher, Herman Katz, who paid for Villaraigosa to take the SAT college entrance exam.

The commercial concludes: “Hands-on leadership, straight from the heart.” The slogan is an echo of the one he used in his 2001 mayoral bid, “Straight from the heart of L.A.”

In a mailer sent this week, Hertzberg touts his endorsement by Richard Riordan and his ties to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Former mayor Riordan reprises his 1993 campaign slogan, calling Hertzberg “tough enough to turn L.A. around.” And Hertzberg promises to work with Riordan, now the state education secretary, and Schwarzenegger on his plan to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters began receiving a Hahn mailer featuring a picture of the mayor with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

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Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Jessica Garrison and Natasha Lee contributed to this report.