100 Very Busy Days for Mayor

His day began with a speech in Koreatown. Next he was off to MacArthur Park to raise money for victims of a fire, followed by a prostate cancer awareness event in Boyle Heights, a downtown health fair, a South L.A. police roll call, a Watts gospel concert and, finally, a Northridge celebration of India’s independence.

So went one day in August for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- a Saturday, in fact. Before sundown, he also found time to have brunch with state Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) and get some work done at the office.

Villaraigosa pledged that he would bring more energy to the mayoralty than his predecessor, James K. Hahn. And as he approaches his 100th day in office Saturday, he has worked to fulfill that campaign promise with an indefatigable, barnstorming style.

As mayor of the nation’s second-largest city and its first Latino leader in more than a century, Villaraigosa also has found himself thrust into the role of national political figure, with all the attendant demands on his time.

It has all added up to a fizzy extended honeymoon, full of TV crews, autograph seekers and well-wishers, and a sense that something exciting is happening in Los Angeles.

Villaraigosa said it was important for him to put a face -- namely his -- on city government early on. And that has meant, in part, following a well-known key to success: simply showing up.

“In my many travels throughout the city, I have noticed a difference in people -- there is a sense of newfound possibility throughout the city,” he said.

In a series of public events Thursday, including a media briefing in the ornate ballroom atop City Hall, the mayor said he had put more than 24,000 miles on his city-issued SUV since the start of his term.

“That’s what this job is -- people want to see you in their neighborhoods,” Villaraigosa said.

But with many of his most ambitious ideas -- a school system takeover, a subway to the Pacific, an expanded Los Angeles Police Department -- far from fruition, the mayor remains vulnerable to one of the main criticisms Hahn leveled in the spring campaign: that he was “a smile and a fancy suit,” whose rhetoric would outweigh his accomplishments. Some of his political moves during the first 100 days leave him open to the criticism that he plays “both sides of the fence,” as one observer suggested, in order to please as many people as possible.

Supporters say three months is not a lot of time to accomplish the kind of dramatic goals Villaraigosa set. They suggest the mayor has laid the groundwork and is building political capital that he can cash in when he has to make tough decisions -- such as possibly increasing taxes or fees to pay for an expansion of the Police Department.

“He’s done an excellent job of reaching out across the cultural and political divide in Los Angeles,” said John Shallman, who headed the campaign for Bob Hertzberg, mayoral candidate and now Villaraigosa ally. “It has helped him become popular. That popularity is something I am hopeful he will use to enact a bold agenda of initiatives.”

Former Mayor Richard Riordan, a close advisor to Villaraigosa, said the strategy will prove to be a sound one.

“Just wait,” Riordan said. “You are going to see some great things come out of this administration.”

On Thursday, Villaraigosa released a four-page summary of his achievements so far.

“I see a hundred days as an opportunity to build a foundation for the rest of the days for this four-year administration, and I feel like we have done a good job laying that foundation,” Villaraigosa said in an interview with The Times.

Appearing tired, his voice raspy, the mayor slumped slightly over a conference table in the mayoral suite at City Hall, occasionally drumming on the table midquestion as if to show he remained fired up by the job.

Greater things are coming, he said.

But not everyone is enjoying the wait. A scattered grumbling beneath the din of excitement points to two key political challenges Villaraigosa will face in coming years: living up to the high expectations he generated during the campaign, and making small-scale progress that can placate voters while they wait for the big stuff.

Take, for example, Lois Newman, head of the Cat and Dog Rescue Assn.

She is waiting for Villaraigosa to fulfill his campaign promises to replace the management of the city Animal Services Department and expand spay and neuter services.

“I like the mayor, but he’s not doing enough,” she said. “He has the right instincts, but he just isn’t acting on them.”

Looking back at his first 100 days, Villaraigosa said the city already has benefited from his hands-on style -- especially when it comes to managing and averting short-term crises.

When terrorists bombed the London transit system, he hopped on the local subway -- with TV cameras in tow -- in an attempt to calm Angelenos’ fears. He appealed for peace at Jefferson High School after violent racial flare-ups there. He urged calm and promised thorough investigations after a fatal police shootout in South L.A. and after Nation of Islam leader Tony Muhammad alleged he was beaten by police.

The mayor said his lobbying, meanwhile, has produced some short-term gains for the city, including $11.4 million in security funding for the port and $130 million in federal funding that could eventually be used to build a carpool lane on the northbound San Diego Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass.

Unlike Hahn, Villaraigosa exercised his mayoral option to be chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He said he will use that position to tear down some of the long-standing barriers to better regional public transportation.

He can count other concrete achievements. On his first day in office he signed an order banning lobbyists from serving on city commissions. He followed with an order prohibiting construction on streets during rush hour.

He launched a campaign that began two weeks ago to fill 50,000 potholes in three months, and the extra crews have finished more than 8,000. He also boosted by 25% the number of miles of streets to be resurfaced.

In making more than 100 appointments to city commissions, including eight Thursday to the Planning Commission, he has been praised for bringing in City Hall critics, environmentalists and average folks, although so far more than 200 commissioners remain from the Hahn administration.

Expanding on a program initiated by Hahn, Villaraigosa was to announce today that he would deploy 50 traffic officers to the busiest intersections during rush hours.

Last week he met with neighborhood leaders to get their input on his budget. And marking his 100th day in office, Villaraigosa has asked city residents to join him Saturday in sprucing up six high schools.

But the most significant campaign promises have not been translated into formal plans.

During the campaign, Villaraigosa said he would add 1,300 police officers within five years.

The current budget -- proposed by Hahn and approved by a City Council that included Villaraigosa -- includes money to add 370 officers in 2005-06; so far 38 have been added to the force of 9,220 Villaraigosa inherited. He has not laid out his plans for keeping that campaign promise, though in an interview he said he would consider pushing for a countywide half-cent sales tax.

“So far, there has been no change to judge him by,” said Sandy Munz, who co-founded a citizens group that has battled cuts in police services.

The mayor said Thursday that the budget he was preparing for next year would have additional officers, although he had not determined how many.

During the campaign, Villaraigosa chided Hahn for not taking seemingly simple, short-term actions to increase security at LAX, such as installing bomb-proof glass in the terminals -- an idea proposed by the Rand Corp. And yet, 100 days into Villaraigosa’s administration, installation of the glass has not begun.

Villaraigosa said Thursday that his Airport Commission was confirmed only recently and that it would make security a high priority.

Of all the issues, Villaraigosa’s reluctance to move to take over the school system has caused the most friction.

During the campaign, Villaraigosa said the mayor should take control of the ailing independent school district, and after he was sworn in, state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) introduced a bill that would have given him takeover power.

Villaraigosa did not support the bill. He said he needed to build “consensus” around the takeover idea, and he noted an opinion by the state legislative counsel’s office that the bill was unconstitutional. Its opponents also included teachers unions that supported Villaraigosa’s candidacy with more than $920,000.

Romero, whose bill is in limbo, said she was disappointed.

“Patience has nothing to do with this,” she said. “This is about leadership.”

Villaraigosa on Thursday said he intends to have control of the city schools by the end of his four-year term. In the meantime, he convened a panel of education experts to come up with smaller ways the city can help.

The schools have not been the only bump in Villaraigosa’s road.

During the campaign, he said the city should not extend its contract to keep dumping most of its trash at the Sunshine Canyon Landfill above Granada Hills. A few weeks after taking office, he asked the council to extend the contract, disappointing the landfill’s neighbors.

The council failed to muster the votes to extend the contract, Villaraigosa’s first legislative setback. But the mayor persuaded the landfill operator to give the city more time to decide, so there will be another vote in February.

And when the issue of giving DWP workers raises of up to 34% over five years came up recently, Villaraigosa said he would not have negotiated the same deal but said he would go along with whatever the council decided. DWP workers spent $306,000 on campaign materials supporting him during the campaign. With the mayor unwilling to provide the council guidance or political cover to vote against the union, the council passed it, 10-3, after which the mayor said the panel had made the right decision.

Jim Alger, president of the Northridge West Neighborhood Council and a longtime critic of the DWP, said Villaraigosa’s comments amounted to “taking both sides of the fence.”

Villaraigosa’s handling of the issue raises the question of whether he will provide leadership on other unpopular proposals -- such as increasing fees to pay for some of his promises.

Ricardo Ramirez, a USC political scientist, describes Villaraigosa as “Clintonesque,” but said the smile and charisma can only take him so far. “He really needs to get to the nuts and bolts of fixing some of the things people want fixed,” Ramirez said.

For now, however, many of the details of governance have been eclipsed by the mayor’s seemingly boundless energy.

“He came to my birthday party way out in the Valley,” said City Councilman Dennis Zine. “And he came to the Fourth of July show that we had -- the first time that a mayor ever did that. He’s not only accessible to the people, he’s accessible to me.”

But how does that translate into fixing the problems that plague the city -- the lack of police and of affordable housing, the bad traffic and bad schools?

Councilman Jack Weiss, one of Villaraigosa’s biggest supporters, suggested that that is not the right question for Villaraigosa’s first 100 days.

“His first task was not to accomplish a specific policy goal. His first task was to reestablish the primacy and pulse of the office of mayor,” Weiss said. “And anyone who has looked at his schedule over the past few months knows that he’s done that.”

Villaraigosa, in turn, is taking credit not only for taking the city’s pulse, but quickening it.

“The story of the last three months can’t be expressed in a list of accomplishments or a litany of policy initiatives,” Villaraigosa said Thursday in a speech at USC. “It’s the expanding sense of energy and possibility that you get traveling throughout the city in the way that I have over the last 100 days -- the palpable sense of resolve and purpose that you can touch and feel and hear in every community and every part of Los Angeles.”