Many Goals Fulfilled (and Potholes Filled)

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa charged into office one year ago promising a safer and more prosperous Los Angeles -- a metropolis of limitless opportunity with more police, less traffic and a reformed public school system.

As he starts his second year on the job, the hyperkinetic mayor has begun to deliver on that vision but has fallen short on his most ambitious gambit, taking over the Los Angeles Unified School District.

A self-proclaimed “proud progressive” -- his office bookshelves bear photos of him alongside former presidents Clinton and Carter -- Villaraigosa displayed a pragmatic streak in year one of his four-year term while also demonstrating a capacity to think big and take risks.

He found money to pay for 1,000 new police officers by winning unanimous City Council support for raising residential trash fees.

He became a born-again fiscal conservative, slashing $47 million from a nearly $300-million budget deficit.

He filled an extra 80,000 potholes and put a halt to construction jobs on major thoroughfares during rush-hour traffic to relieve cranky commuters.

“I tried to focus on keeping the promises ... I made when I applied for this job,” Villaraigosa said last week, adding with characteristic impatience: “It’s never good enough for me. I always want more.”

But the 53-year-old Villaraigosa failed to meet all of the high expectations he set for himself.

He had to settle for a compromise on his bid to run L.A. Unified, leaving him only partially in control while possibly muddying the very lines of accountability he had intended to clarify and spawning new power struggles with a school board he has criticized as meddlesome.

The agreement, struck with teachers unions in Sacramento, opened Villaraigosa to criticism that he skirted local voters and cut a backroom deal to save himself from what threatened to be a publicly embarrassing defeat.

He worked out the deal with the very organization, United Teachers Los Angeles, with which he began his career as a labor negotiator.

Villaraigosa chose to cast the outcome as a victory that he accepted on behalf of the district’s 727,000 schoolchildren. For him, the resulting proposal, which still requires legislative approval, represented a major step toward improving the public schools -- what he continues to call “the central priority of my administration.”

During a 90-minute interview in a conference room outside his City Hall office -- with an aide popping in every few minutes, trying to hurry him along -- the mayor acknowledged that the school deal lacked “the full accountability that we had hoped for” and that pointed criticism and newspaper editorials had left him irritated and angry.

“There’s no question that because I don’t have the absolute authority, I’m going to have to work harder,” he said.

From the time he was a candidate, Villaraigosa’s closeness to labor had worried some in the business community. The depth of those ties became even more apparent this spring when a close friend, former City Councilman and Los Angeles County labor federation chief Martin Ludlow, pleaded guilty to charges of diverting union funds into his council campaign.

Villaraigosa, who was not implicated in the scandal, stood by Ludlow, calling him “a good man” who “is like a son to me.” On the mayor’s office shelves near pictures of the presidents is a prominent photo of him with Ludlow.

The mayor was Los Angeles’ most unabashed booster, a tanned and pressed ambassador selling a Utopian dream -- alternately declaring Los Angeles “the center of the universe” and “the entertainment and cultural capital of the world.”

He crisscrossed the city in a blazing daily ritual, sometimes racing to half a dozen appearances and seeming equally comfortable at a synagogue on the Westside, a business luncheon in the San Fernando Valley or a housing project in South L.A.

He also maintained a busy schedule outside Los Angeles, flying to Sacramento five times and Washington seven times to lobby for his school district plan or money for transportation projects and other priorities.

At times he glossed over Los Angeles’ simmering racial tensions in favor of portraying what he called the “new Ellis Island of America,” a multiethnic fabric of rich and poor stitched together by a common fate.

“This city is the great experiment that really works,” Villaraigosa said in May after emerging from meetings with U.S. Olympic Committee officials over the city’s bid to play host to the 2016 Games. “I believe this is the city of America’s promise. I believe in its destiny.”

Those who study city politics say Villaraigosa injected new vigor into the mayor’s office that was missing under his predecessor, James K. Hahn, who was widely viewed as a 9-to-5 chief executive.

Villaraigosa filled the vacuum, capitalizing on a new public role that turned him overnight into a powerful figurehead for a disparate city and into one of California’s most recognizable personalities. People who had never before heard of Antonio Villaraigosa came to know his name, even if they couldn’t pronounce it.

“People want to be in the same room, want to be energized by him. He is seen as almost royalty,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A. “He’s had a fantastic political year.”

Part of his appeal, Regalado and others say, stems from what they call the “likability factor.”

“His gregariousness is a plus,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a Republican strategist who publishes a nonpartisan election guide. “Being likable is a powerful political tool, because people want to work with you and want you to succeed.”

But Villaraigosa rubbed some people the wrong way, eclipsing City Council members and other leaders eager to raise their own profiles. At times he grabbed credit for achievements when others had done the heavy lifting. And his repeated criticism of the Los Angeles schools offended many district leaders, who accused him of damaging L.A. Unified’s reputation to further his own ambitions.

Yet even some critics declined to criticize Villaraigosa on the record, fearing they would offend Los Angeles’ most-influential elected leader -- often mentioned as a future candidate for governor, senator or even president.

One leader called Villaraigosa a “skilled political operative” who acts as if he has been “anointed” rather than elected. Another official, sizing up the mayor’s avowedly healthy ego, said he “gets carried away with himself.”

Those critics and others, however, acknowledged the breadth of initiatives undertaken by Villaraigosa in his first year, a point that his staff was eager to emphasize.

The mayor’s press deputies last week released a 17-page summary of his accomplishments in education, transportation, public safety, business development and other areas.

According to his staff, Villaraigosa:

* Confronted poverty by fully funding for the first time a $100-million affordable housing trust to help subsidize apartments for the working poor and the homeless. The mayor also led a poverty task force for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

* Sought to ease traffic congestion by launching “gridlock tiger teams” to tow vehicles parked illegally along congested corridors, starting with Wilshire Boulevard, during rush hour. And he secured an estimated $1 billion for various transportation projects, including a subway to the sea that would run beneath Wilshire, as part of a state public works bond that voters still need to approve in the fall.

* Set the city on a path to convert most of its vehicles to alternative fuels within four years and helped produce a deal with the busiest shipping line at the Port of Los Angeles to reduce container ship emissions.

Villaraigosa became a fiscal watchdog after he was elected, meeting with his managers regularly and ordering them to cut costs.

“I didn’t run on fiscal responsibility,” he said. “But as soon as I saw the budget situation, I knew I had to be a fiscal leader, a prudent mayor.... It became a big issue for me.”

Although Villaraigosa was a visible public figure, he often conducted much of his business behind the scenes. He helped negotiate labor agreements, and he played an important role in a still-unfolding effort to lure a professional football team to Los Angeles by wooing National Football League owners.

“I’m a consensus builder,” Villaraigosa said, adding that he still wakes up excited about going to work. “I feel very humbled to be in this job. Very grateful.”

All along, Villaraigosa has appeared happiest when he was most frenzied -- and when the stakes were highest. Nowhere was that clearer than in his fight over control of the public schools.

During frequent lobbying trips to Sacramento, Villaraigosa had the air of a champion fighter, bobbing and weaving through the corridors of the Capitol, trying to land a knock-out blow by leveraging Republicans against Democrats wary of crossing powerful teachers unions that historically contribute to the parties’ political coffers.

“I learned in the Legislature that in the throes of chaos, opportunity knocks,” he said. “I enjoy finding the opportunity.”

Villaraigosa’s pragmatism was on display in another high-wire act: his response to huge but peaceful pro-immigration rallies that engulfed Los Angeles in the spring.

Villaraigosa waded carefully into the politically explosive rallies, voicing solidarity with marchers in search of the American dream while scolding students for skipping class to attend the protests.

He also expressed support for what he called bipartisan immigration laws that would secure the nation’s borders but also provide a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants.

“He did his best to play it down the middle,” a strategy that would appeal to centrist and independent voters, said Regalado of the Brown institute.

Villaraigosa also tried to play smart politics in forging a relationship with the state’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The mayor appeared alongside Schwarzenegger on several occasions to promote the public works bond measure on the November ballot -- a bipartisan pairing that he called worthwhile for promoting good public policy but one that political strategists viewed as a ploy to capture the hearts of moderate voters.

Aligning himself with the state’s most powerful Republican, if only on isolated issues, would help Villaraigosa if he decides to run for governor in four years.

But that’s the future. Villaraigosa says he loves his current job and that his immediate plans call for more of the same in year two.

“I want to do a good job. Finish out my term,” he said. “I intend to run for reelection. That’s as far down the road as I can look.”