POLITICS - It is with both pride and dread that Angelenos must be viewing the leadership role of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. While an elevated profile of the man who connected faraway Washington power brokers with a West Coast city is hoped to bode well for Angelenos, these same Angelenos are understandably concerned about an occupied and absent Mayor while the City of the Angels is on the verge of going broke.
Anyone who has regularly read CityWatch, the Los Angeles Times or any other Los Angeles or national publication, knows that the City of Los Angeles is in deep financial trouble. Hundreds of millions of dollars are owed to City pension funds, and the fiscal mess facing City Hall has forced both union give-backs (angering many City workers) and service cut-backs (angering…well…everyone).
Yet while Los Angeles must focus on building its own economy, it must also fight for state and federal dollars when it comes to transportation and infrastructure. While one might rightly argue that personal/marital conflicts, fights with administrative heads, a rivalry with the LAUSD that is independent of the governance of the City of Los Angeles, and a host of other distractions have hurt Mayor Villaraigosa’s tenure, it cannot be argued that he has failed in T/I issues.
Quite the contrary—the mayor who early in his eight-year tenure ran up and down Wilshire Blvd galvanizing support for widening the I-405 freeway, is the same man who worked with County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and House Representative Henry Waxman to reverse their fiscal and legal constraints on building the once-and-future Wilshire Subway. Under former Mayor Hahn, the Wilshire Subway was considered a pipe dream 50 years in the making. But now …
Not if, but when the Wilshire Subway is built, it will be almost singularly behind Mayor Villaraigosa’s leadership. Measure R, which Villaraigosa championed, is a countywide sales tax that showed Washington that local governments could put their money where their mouth is when it came to decades-overdue freeway, road and rail projects—and that federal matching programs for loans and grants were a moral and governmental imperative.
It certainly can be entertained that, whoever should win the presidency in November, a Transportation Secretary Villaraigosa would be a good fit for Washington, and for cities and counties who rely on Washington, to repair and upgrade our nation’s transportation/infrastructure grid.
Villaraigosa’s other efforts have had mixed results. Did Villaraigosa follow former Mayor Riordan’s lead to shake up the LAUSD’s out-of-touch operations? Yes. Did Villaraigosa, despite his background as a union operative, take on those City and education unions who have stopped representing and start hurting the citizenry? Yes. Did Villaraigosa make tough decisions to balance the City budget (albeit too late for many)? Yes.
So while no one should proclaim Villaraigosa’s tenure to be undeserving of criticism (and I suspect that the Mayor would be the first to agree with that), it’s neither fair nor accurate to conclude that his tenure is undeserving of praise, either. Will Mayor Villaraigosa run for governor? For senator? For…president?
Those questions beg answering, but another question that begs an answer is what the Mayor will do during the remainder of his tenure. Clearly, the need to address the City’s immediate problems is paramount—and while Antonio Villaraigosa’s national profile is being elevated, the other glaring questions surrounding who will replace the obviously-moving-on Mayor need answering as well.
While November’s federal election races are the most immediate issues that voting Angelenos face, the spring of 2013 and the Mayoral/City Council races of Los Angeles are not far behind—and should already be on the mind of Angelenos who wonder how or even if the mayoral contenders who wish to replace Antonio Villaraigosa can keep the city out of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
In fact, the need to confront whether Chapter 9 bankruptcy, and/or the need of voters to say no to new City taxes and threaten a Chapter 9 bankruptcy in order to establish further and necessary charter reform, is a fundamental question that might be fair to proclaim as a legacy of the outgoing Villaraigosa mayoral tenure.
The four main mayoral contenders (insiders City Controller Wendy Greuel, City Councilmember Eric Garcetti, City Councilmember Jan Perry and outsider/prosecutor Kevin James) will all need to ask themselves whether they can truly keep Los Angeles out of Chapter 9 bankruptcy … or if they are willing to confront it as a method of reversing the heretofore-irreversible operating problems in Los Angeles that have occurred during and even before Mayor Villaraigosa’s terms as mayor.
The mayoral contenders will need to explain how they can truly represent Angeleno homeowners, other residents and businesses while also pursuing closed-door sessions with intransigent public unions that currently exclude ordinary Angelenos. They will need to answer those who want further charter reform that would empower, and not marginalize, neighborhood councils that best represent the grassroots leadership of LA neighborhoods.
And, of course, the mayoral contenders will have to explain their own transportation/infrastructure visions as well as how to take on the independent-but-interdependent LAUSD administration and teachers unions.
During elections, there are many words spoken that usually fail to produce action, and after elections the need to see action is by far more important than mere words. But the challenges and hopes, and the failures and successes, established by eight years of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa cannot be ignored.
As Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa starts his journey to somewhere beyond the City of the Angels, the need to hold his putative successors’ feet to the fire will be more paramount than ever as we confront the fallout and aftermath of the Villaraigosa Era of Los Angeles.
(Ken Alpern is a former Boardmember of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee, chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and is co-chair of the non-profit Friends of the Green Line (www.fogl.us). He can be reached at [email protected]. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.) -cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 71
Pub: Sept 4, 2012