GROWING PAINS
So far, the candidates for mayor are saying little about the city's most pressing topic, L.A.'s rapi
The presidential race had its moral values and Vietnam-era deflection. The gubernatorial recall had its action-movie metaphors. And as the Los Angeles mayoral race shapes up following the first debate last week, we have corruption investigations and public safety to divert our eyes from the real issues. If you ask the experts, the big cloud above L.A. is not alleged "pay to play" contributor-cum-contractor corruption, or up-and-down crime stats, or frustrating street repairs that clog rush hour traffic, as former state Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg suggested.
No, in this race, it's the growth, stupid.
According to the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the Los Angeles region is expected to grow by six million people - adding the population equivalent of two San Diego counties - by the year 2025. The influx will strain streets, buses, and rail lines, create even greater demand for apartments, condos, and houses, and put more stress on electricity lines, water resources, and emergency services. Whoever takes City Hall's top job in March will have a rare opportunity to put his stamp on a groundbreaking era in Los Angeles history. So why aren't any of the mayoral candidates - incumbent Mayor Jim Hahn, Councilmen Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard Parks, Hertzberg, and state Sen. Richard Alarcón - making growth a centerpiece of their platforms?
"When you start to talk about growth, you get a lot of people rolling their eyes," says Jack Kyser, chief economist and senior vice president of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. "It's not the sexiest issue out there."
During last week's mayoral debate, the first leading up to the March 8 election, all four of Hahn's major challengers hammered him for the investigations into alleged contractor favoritism at City Hall. But none, not even the mayor, presented much of a vision for future development and infrastructure in this deepening megalopolis.
"The Chamber hopes they do talk about growth, particularly how it impacts infrastructure, and how the city can accommodate growth," says Brendan Huffman, director of public policy at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. "At the same time, talking about infrastructure and growth is not a good political strategy because you run the risk of scaring voters that you're going to bring in more people, more pollution."
The problem is, the people and pollution are coming whether anyone talks about it or not. The mayor stuck to his guns at the debate, touting his record on public safety, but he did throw a bone to growth and infrastructure, proposing more light-rail transit for the city. And he said he hopes the campaign will become less of an attack on him and more of a debate about the future of the nation's second-largest city. "We do know that the city continues to attract people and that creates growing pains," Hahn told reporters.
"I think in watching this debate tonight, up there we saw three candidates that don't have anything to say but attacking me," Hahn said. "I think people want to talk about the issues. They want to talk about the kind of city we want to have."
Alarcón, an underdog who gained the most from the debate with a come-from-behind performance (despite suffering from pinkeye in both peepers), seems to be the least critical of the mayor. Although he is proposing an anti-"pay to play" ballot initiative, the senator says he really does want to talk about the issues.
"I don't think the people of Los Angeles want the alternative candidates to focus on Jim Hahn's scandals," Alarcón told CityBeat. "It would be sad if we had this election process and we were not able to create new ideas. At one point in the debate, I leaned over to Jim Hahn and said, 'If I beat you, it will be with ideas, not with attacks.'"
Alarcón says he will introduce state legislation to essentially create a regional airport north of Los Angeles to take a load off Los Angeles International Airport's shoulders, and to ease the stress of the jet-blasted neighborhoods surrounding the airfield. He also wants to give neighborhood councils the power to approve development in their areas, so long as they comply with the city's general plan.
That scares Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar at USC's School of Policy, Planning, and Development and a keen mayoral-race handicapper. "I have long been nervous about what might happen if growth decisions were made on such a small level as a neighborhood council," she says. "Talk about traffic problems and an uneven growth pattern."
Councilman Villaraigosa, who lost to Hahn in the last mayoral election, parroted the line that the Hahn administration was "paralyzed by scandal." But he also found time to talk growth, even if it was in a piecemeal way. The mayor's strongest challenger proposed to "cut the red tape" for developers, sell surplus city land to those who build affordable housing, encourage a biomedical research triangle among the area's top universities, and to "make education my number-one priority."
"I think we need to limit growth to responsible growth ... growth that has the voice of neighborhoods involved," Villaraigosa said during the debate.
Hertzberg has already proposed a city beautification and cleanup program he calls Renew LA. He said he thinks South L.A. is the place for more housing. And he wants the Los Angeles Unified School District - calling it too large, unwieldy, and bureaucratic - broken up into smaller districts. Hertzberg seems to be the most pro-business of the bunch. "We're competing not just with Glendale, we're competing with Shanghai," he said.
Parks said he wants more "workforce housing" and that he wants to place four transportation-related city departments under one "transportation deputy."
Still, there's that vision thing.
"Why wasn't growth talked about?" says Jeffe. "It's a very difficult question to deal with, and any candidate worth his or her salt knows when to veer away from a difficult question that requires a difficult and complex answer - perhaps one they don't have."
SCAG Executive Director Mark Pisano has a pretty good sense of which candidates are paying attention to growth. Three of them - Hahn, Villaraigosa, and Parks - are on the Regional Council of the association, which is obsessed with impending growth. "Let me just say we have a lot more work to do," Pisano says.
"First, we certainly need an increase in wages and income for the people who live in the city of Los Angeles," he says. "Second, we need housing that people in this city can afford. Third, we have a lot of congestion, and that congestion, and the quality of life associated with it, needs to be improved."
Still, Pisano is giving the candidates a break, saying it's a little too early for them to put all their cards on the table. "I think the issue of what the vision is for the city is, and will be, one of the central issues in this campaign," he says.Published: 12/09/2004
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