That deadly gang in City Hall

Like the poor, feckless governance always will be with us. There’s nothing new in that, and one of the most commonly repeated proverbs in English has survived since the heart of the Classical era: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”

Actually, he did worse than that. According to one contemporary source, he actually lighted the fire in AD 64 to provide a suitable backdrop against which to declaim his verses on the fall of Troy while he plucked his lyre. (The fiddle’s invention still was some time off.) Other sources claim that Nero simply let the fire that ultimately consumed three-quarters of Rome burn because he was tired of dealing with property owners opposed to his building schemes.

In any event, Nero has become synonymous with deadly inaction in the face of crisis, which is precisely why his name springs to mind as one considers the Los Angeles City Council and its dangerous fiddling over control of the city’s anti-gang programs.

Over the last few months, a series of shootings and killings involving gang members has shocked the conscience of a metropolis all too used to shrugging and turning away from the mostly black and Latino, mostly poor and working-class neighborhoods where gangs long have thrived. Maybe it’s the sheer wantonness of this recent violence -- a drive-by shooting just outside the fence of a grammar school playground; an immensely promising student athlete with a mother serving in Iraq gunned down steps from his own front door; children on their way home from school hit at a bus stop; the college scholarship-winning son of hardworking Jamaican immigrants shot to death on his way to a party in South L.A. No one will be surprised if the four shooting deaths that rocked East Los Angeles on Monday turn out to have a gang component.

For whatever reason, a critical mass of public outrage has been reached, and demands that something different be done in response to this wave of carnage have grown.

The best proposal -- because it’s sensible, doable now and builds on insights from civil rights attorney Connie Rice’s massive study of the problem -- is the one City Controller Laura Chick produced after her office audited the whole range of Los Angeles’ anti-gang programs. Her suggestion is that all existing programs be placed under a single official in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office. The plausible theory here is that centralization will provide focus, urgency, accountability and better coordination at a time when budgetary constraints demand that Los Angeles wring as much good as possible from every hard-won dollar it spends on this critical need.

With the mayor’s staff ransacking City Hall to find ways to close an estimated $400-million budget deficit before next year’s spending plan is presented on April 21, Chick’s proposal simply seems like common sense. That’s why it’s supported by Police Chief William J. Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca and the mayor, who didn’t ask for the responsibility but is willing to take it on because he recognizes a genuine civic crisis when he sees one.

The gang problem, in fact, is likely to get substantial treatment in Villaraigosa’s upcoming state-of-the-city address, and the public will get a chance to gauge the mayor’s commitment to the issue by watching to see whether his bare-bones budget maintains the current level of funding for anti-gang programs.

So what’s the problem? Why has the proposal been languishing for weeks with its future more uncertain by the day?

City Councilman Tony Cardenas, who chairs the ad hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development, wants to maintain the lawmakers’ current control of these programs, their funding and all the contracts involved. Over the last two weeks, Cardenas and his committee have held two hearings that have done worse than nothing. They’ve produced five motions -- four demanding studies and information designed to undermine the conclusions in the controller’s audit and one, introduced Friday, to create an entirely new city department to take over all gang-related initiatives.

So what do you think the chances are of creating a new city department, when we can’t afford the government we’ve already got? None, which even this council knows. So what’s this really about?

In large part, it has to do with Cardenas’ desire to maintain a say over programs and contracts. Millions of dollars for anti-gang programs are currently under the control of council members. He’s quietly built political capital by selectively micromanaging the city’s bond contracts through his chairmanship of an ad hoc committee on that process, and something similar is going on here.

Then there’s the fact that Eric Garcetti, who ostensibly supports Chick’s proposal, is a weak council president, unable consistently to move legislation through the committees and wary of a likely challenge to his leadership from Councilman Herb Wesson. Cardenas would be an important swing vote if Garcetti has to fend off Wesson.

And what to make of the members who seconded Cardenas’ patently delaying motions -- Ed Reyes, Bernard Parks, Jose Huizar, Jan Perry and Janice Hahn? Like Cardenas, some want to be courted by the council president; others sense that Villaraigosa’s difficult and distracted year has created a vacuum in which their own ambitions might be cultivated.

In other words, it’s venal, small-minded council politics as usual -- while the body count grows.