Sometimes You’ve Got to Be a Nag

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina is not popular at City Hall. She annoys her council colleagues by seeming to put herself on a higher ethical level than they.

She’s something of a nag, given to standing behind her desk in council chambers while lecturing other members or department heads.

But sometimes it takes someone like that to make things happen in city government.

Molina was out nagging in her district Tuesday, on Union Drive just west of downtown. She was there to complain about earthquake preparations in Los Angeles.

Union Drive is one of many narrow streets just above Wilshire Boulevard, where thousands of Central American immigrants live crowded in brick apartments built 60 or 70 years ago.

While examining a city list of buildings to be brought up to earthquake safety standards, Molina had spotted two apartment houses with Union Drive addresses. Accompanied by a news crew from Channel 13, she had gone there to make a point: Her district contained many old buildings in need of repair.

One was a brown brick apartment house trimmed in a sickly, institutional green. The second was another brown bricker, its architectural distinction being a large metal plate on the front door. The sidewalks were crowded with passers-by. On the street, boys played football. It didn’t take much imagination to picture the bricks raining down on the day of a quake.

But when Molina and the Channel 13 crew arrived, they found that one building had already been brought up to safety standards and work had begun on the other. It looked as though a bad news story had become a good news story.

Molina, however, wasn’t so sure. She was troubled by the accuracy of the list, given to her by the Department of Building and Safety. The department told her it was a computer error. But she wondered if the department had lost track of how many buildings need repair.

As she pursued the matter, something else began to trouble her. The city Community Development Department had about $16 million in federal funds to loan for safety repairs, but couldn’t find any landlords who wanted it.

Now she was mad.

Her City Council colleagues don’t like it when she gets mad. It means trouble for the city’s department heads, who become the targets of her wrath. In the closed society that is City Hall, it ends up meaning trouble for everybody.

For it is not considered good manners or smart politics to embarrass the heads of departments, who dispense the city’s vital services, from garbage collection to street repairs. These people are powerful. They have Civil Service protection and only conduct approaching the felonious can force them out.

When a council member complains about the slow pace of street repairs, the work slows even more. So great is the fear of this sort of below-the-belt retaliation that council members do not even like to be associated with complainers. Rather, they each develop their own quiet rapport with the department bosses, rewarding them each year with merit raises.

Molina has many illegal immigrants in her district and they can’t vote, meaning the neighborhoods lack political power. Molina says the department heads, aware that the residents are powerless, ignore them. When she complains, she says, the department heads tell her, “Oh Gloria, don’t get so excited.”

Nothing makes her more excited than that.

In this instance, what really concerns her is the $16 million in federal loan funds that are going unspent.

The money is for low-interest loans to landlords or other property owners with buildings that fail to meet city earthquake standards.

The Community Development Department says nobody wants to borrow the money because the federal government has placed too many restrictions on it. It’s not enough to make earthquake repairs. The entire building must be upgraded. Even leaky faucets must be fixed. And workers must be paid the prevailing union wage. City officials say that raises the cost of a $3,000 earthquake repair job to a $12,000 remodeling.

Community Development Department officials have expressed their frustration to local officials of the Housing and Urban Development Department--but in a manner that Molina regards as too polite and leisurely. City officials privately concede that their complaints have been ignored.

What makes Molina mad is that the department heads do not share her excitement. She wants Mayor Tom Bradley and other city officials to go to Washington and demand elimination of these restrictions.

Will she get them there? Probably not. But the fact that she is nagging about it has focused public attention on the pace of earthquake safety repairs. Sometimes you’ve just got to be a nag.