Patsaouras’ Plan Stresses Role of Transit : Election: Mayoral candidate says housing, parks and stores can blossom along rail corridors, unifying the city. But is anyone listening to his esoteric message?

A bumpy night on the campaign trail for Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Nick Patsaouras begins when the moderator of a forum loses a battle of phonetics with the candidate’s name. “Pets-HO-ruhs,” she offers bravely.

Then Patsaouras (who pronounces his Greek name Pat-sa-OH-russ) has to listen patiently as a rival candidate, City Councilman Michael Woo, introduces himself to the Armenian Professional Society as the “father” of a popular festival of Armenian culture.

And when Patsaouras speaks glowingly of one of his greatest achievements--a decade-long fight to win funding for the city’s new subway system--a woman in the audience can only worry about “the crime it is going to create, and the graffiti.”

For supporters of the self-made millionaire businessman and county transportation commissioner, this night crystallized the dilemma of the mayoral campaign: how to excite the public about a man whose name they hardly know with a message that is decidedly esoteric.

Early attention-grabbers in the race have been candidates pushing racially tinged, hot-button issues such as illegal immigration and the breakup of the Los Angeles school district. Patsaouras has been methodically promoting his detailed plan to “unlock linear cities by building along transit lines.”

Dubbing himself “the man with a plan,” he has spent more than a year cultivating and winning the support of some of the city’s brightest minds. Historian Kevin Starr, architect Frank Gehry, urban theorist Mike Davis and others meet regularly with Patsaouras, an electrical engineer, to discuss the city’s future. Lately, they have discussed how to get their man into office.

“There has been a lot of talk about how to ratchet up and promote such a serious candidacy in an age of sound bites,” Starr said. “The campaign understands that is the challenge.”

The Patsaouras faithful say they are unfazed by political pundits who do not place their man among the front-runners and by early reports that show him lagging in fund raising. They point to another once-obscure “man with a plan” who now occupies the White House.

Patsaouras, a 49-year-old Tarzana resident, has put his political future in the hands of Bill Carrick, a consultant fresh off successfully directing Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate campaign.

Carrick said he is still pondering how to project two images of Patsaouras--that of the candidate with specific proposals for revitalizing the city and that of the immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles as a teen-ager, with $3 in his pocket, and built his own engineering firm.

“I think it’s a great story and we have to tell it,” Carrick said. “It’s the story of someone who is not part of the incredibly unpopular institutions of government that everyone has lost faith in.”

His supporters sigh at the early focus on issues such as immigration and breaking up the school district, which they see as thinly veiled appeals to racial divisiveness. Such matters also fall largely outside the mayor’s purview, unlike the planning initiatives at the heart of Patsaouras’ pitch.

Patsaouras remains outwardly serene and tries to remain focused on his 10-page blueprint--which proposes using the publicly owned land around future train and subway stations to build clusters of affordable housing, parks, day-care centers and stores.

With other government treasuries languishing in the red, Patsaouras would finance his dream with what he considers one of the few stable sources of funding--the $184 billion slated for Los Angeles transportation projects over the next 30 years.

As a prototype for such developments, Patsaouras cited a proposal to turn vacant land around the Metro Rail’s MacArthur Park station into 350 affordable housing units, a supermarket, a five-screen theater, a police substation, shops and a public plaza.

“It will be a place where people can come and be together and be outside and be safe,” Patsaouras rhapsodizes.

Such plans can appeal to the public, campaign managers say, if Patsaouras can avoid slipping into his planner-engineer’s argot.

The candidate tells the Armenian professionals he would solve the city’s homeless problem in part through “densification along transit corridors.” When asked about the need for metal detectors in schools, he launches another digression on “densification.”

Patsaouras insists that his focus is appropriate--arguing that only new development can bring jobs and only jobs can solve larger social problems such as school violence. New train and Metro lines also can bring together increasingly isolated communities and become “the social equalizer of Los Angeles.”

Some outside of Los Angeles have been intrigued by the notion of a candidate with ideas. The San Jose Mercury News devoted much of a front page story on the mayor’s race to Patsaouras, noting that observers “say he’s the only candidate so far to advance a comprehensive vision for the city.”

Others say the vision is a little blurry.

“People don’t understand the ideas and don’t relate to them,” said one veteran campaign consultant, who is neutral in the mayor’s race. “They are bright ideas and very thoughtful, but whether they relate to the average voter will be decided on Election Day.”

Campaign professionals and competitors say that such problems are compounded by shortcomings: Patsaouras was sixth among mayoral hopefuls to report reaching a $200,000 fund-raising plateau that must be reported to the city. His posts on the RTD board and Los Angeles County Transportation Commission give him a less visible pulpit than his opponents from the City Council and state Legislature to make the kind of policy pronouncements that receive press attention. He does not have a sizable ethnic base to which he can readily appeal. He has a cumbersome name and a pronounced Greek accent that some listeners find difficult to penetrate.

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But Patsaouras--a big thinker who once proposed a mega-monument to immigrants that would straddle the Hollywood Freeway--has answers to turn each of those problems on its ear.

He says that his campaign budget of up to $1.5 million, while at least $500,000 less than that of several opponents, will be big enough to do the job. With 52 people running for mayor, a candidate could need less than 20% of the votes to advance from the April primary into a June runoff.

His tenure with the transit agencies proves, he says, his ability to get things done, particularly the continued funding of the Red Line subway, which opened Saturday. It also has allowed him to propose perks to customers--such as free rides to passengers whose RTD buses are more than 15 minutes late and removing fares for inaugural riders on the subway.

He is aggressively pursuing votes from other ethnic groups, particularly Latinos. Patsaouras speaks Spanish fluently and his wife, Sylvia, is from Mexico.

Patsaouras supporters believe his Greek heritage and accent can be a plus in a city loaded with immigrants. “I suggested he use Zorba the Greek music in some of his radio ads,” said Starr, the historian. “Then take all those syllables in his name and make music out of them-- Pat-sa-ooooooooo-ras!”

The candidate has appeared on Korean-, Spanish- and Armenian-language television news programs and says people have noticed him. “They stop me and say: ‘I identify with you,’ ” Patsaouras said.

The intellectuals who support him are looking for a way to play a more significant role in his campaign--perhaps through fund-raisers or a promotional video.

Davis would like to see Patsaouras seek out what he believes is an untapped resource--student activists. “What is key now, more than anything, is getting an army of youths on the streets,” he said. “They have a chance they haven’t had since the first (Mayor Tom) Bradley election to challenge the whole cynical role of money in elections.”

Patsaouras said he will keep pounding away with his plan. He believes that it is not too dry or esoteric for a city looking for changes.

“I know what I want to do within an hour of taking office about jobs, public open space, transportation--use infrastructure to connect us physically, emotionally, spiritually. That is what transportation does. It forms the city.”