Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s free tickets

Perhaps Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa remembers his 2005 campaign, in which he repeatedly told voters he would “restore trust and confidence” in City Hall. Los Angeles looked forward to having a mayor who set the highest standards of ethical conduct and transparency after four years of what Villaraigosa liked to call “the most investigated administration since Frank Shaw.”

That lofty rhetoric is at sharp odds with the behavior of the mayor who, recent reports in The Times and elsewhere show, claims that his role as chief executive and promoter of Los Angeles entitles him to accept tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free tickets to concerts and sporting events.

Either Villaraigosa attended these events on his personal time, in which case he should have paid his own way, or he accepted the tickets as gifts, in which case he should have reported them and observed the annual $420-per-donor limit. Or perhaps he really was representing the city at these events, as he claims, in which case he should demonstrate that a majority of his time was devoted to official business, and that he didn’t just present a scroll to an entertainer or kibitz with a team owner as an excuse to score a freebie.

It’s not that his loose interpretation of ethics laws or his sloppy record-keeping is the next Watergate. Rather, it’s that Villaraigosa is turning into the caricature that his detractors have for so long depicted: a man steeped in a sense of entitlement, adept at making excuses, and unwilling or incapable of distinguishing between what’s good for his city and what’s good for himself.

Villaraigosa argues that he doesn’t need to report his freebies as gifts pursuant to city law because when he’s sitting courtside at a Lakers game or attending a Beyonce concert, he’s working.

Oh, mayor, please. You’re going to a Lakers game for us? You’re sitting at a concert for the good of the city?

Villaraigosa has taken heat in the past for jet-setting around the nation, campaigning for Hillary Clintonand hobnobbing with officials in Washington, but The Times has no problem with any of that. He’s a big-city mayor, and voters elected him in part to bring Los Angeles some needed visibility, some deserved cachet and some federal cash. His work and his value cannot be measured by the number of hours he sits at his desk. But the nature of his “work” as a guest at sporting events is questionable, at best, especially when many of his hosts, including at the Beyonce concert and Lakers games, are companies that do an enormous amount of business with the city.

The mayor says he observed all city laws. An investigation will determine whether that’s true, but that almost misses the point. Villaraigosa promised an administration without even the appearance of self-serving practices. He promised “trust and confidence.” That’s not what we’re getting.