Time to Keep Promises

“Now the work begins.”

So said Alex Padilla after his landslide victory in last week’s runoff election for the 7th District City Council seat, promising words from a strong campaigner who clearly knows what work means.

Promise is what the start of a political career is all about. What Padilla won Tuesday is the opportunity to live up to that promise.

His first promise, made at his victory party, is to fix a traffic light near the Pacoima elementary school he attended as a child. Taking care of basic services is especially important to this mostly working-class district, whose residents feel they don’t get their share of attention from City Hall. Padilla should rightly take pride in seeing that they do.

The campaign stands he took on issues such as transportation, schools and the City Charter reform measure, which also won voters’ approval, hold out the promise that Padilla will also take seriously his obligation to serve not just his district but the city as a whole.

Padilla’s opponent blamed her loss on his support from unions, which undoubtedly played a role in helping Padilla get out the vote in both the primary and runoff elections. One of Padilla’s coming tests will be how fair and, if need be, tough he will be when dealing with contract negotiations and other issues in which the unions have an interest. Padilla told The Times, “I will always vote for what I believe and feel is the best interest of the city and of my district.” We will hold him to this promise.

But other candidates with strong union support lost--Victor Griego in the Eastside council district, for one. So clearly there were other factors in Padilla’s victory. Age, apparently, was one. Padilla managed to turn what some (we were among them) saw as a disadvantage--his relative lack of experience--into an asset. Voters liked the fact that a local kid went away and did well, graduating from MIT, then came home to do good. Half his volunteers were enthusiastic young people not commonly seen among the political crowd. Keeping these new faces involved in city politics is another promise worth keeping.