Eric Garcetti
Photo by Ted Soqui
If you call or visit L.A. City Council President Eric Garcetti’s office, you’ll be greeted by someone nice. It seems everyone who works there is not only polite, but in an impressively genuine way (not a creepy, Freaks-like “one of us, one of us” way).
It could be something in the water at City Hall, but then you’d expect to find such good humor in all the other offices, too. More likely, the 13th District office is infected by its perpetually smiling boss. Garcetti represents the tiny but dense 13th District that wraps around the mountains to include parts of Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Atwater Village, but he isn’t exactly one of the easygoing hipsters who have come to populate those gentrifying neighborhoods – though he can sometimes be sighted bicycling alongside them.
When speaking to Garcetti, he reflects more of an academic bent, his thoughts organized neatly, sometimes spoken as bullet points and sub-points, as though read from an outline. That’s probably because of the time he spent teaching international relations at USC and Occidental, but while many ivory tower-types are content to look down on the world’s problems without dirtying their hands, Garcetti is different. Driven by an idealism visible right through his permanent smile, he ran for council and won in 2001. Since then he’s made environmental issues, as well as clean-up in his district, the signature issues in his tenure on the council. He spoke to CityBeat about those projects, the city budget, and why everyone in his office is so damn nice.
–Greg Katz
CityBeat: What were the ideals that made you decide to get started in government?
Eric Garcetti: I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, but my parents both met working for Pan Am Airlines. As part of that, they always raised me seeing a lot of the world, whether it was in my backyard or overseas. I’ve had the good fortune of being able to work and live … in Ethiopia and Burma. Those were moments that really changed my life, seeing both the extreme poverty with which people lived their lives, people who were living under oppressive governments and environments that were civil wars, but also recognizing the joy that people had in conditions with much less than what we have here. I’ve always been driven towards trying to make the world a better place and to incorporate social justice into my life.
Have your experiences on the council challenged those ideals?
I will go in a single day from holding a mother whose 14-year-old son has been shot and killed blocks away from where I live in Echo Park, literally being with a neighbor, to meeting with a developer and trying to make sure there’s affordable housing in a large new development in the center of Hollywood, to meeting with the mayor to discuss what we’re going to do about implementing renewable energy and everything in between. And my staff – we have people who literally come to us as a last resort, people whose power has been cut off on Thanksgiving because they live in a building full of slumlords. Veterans who have no housing and can’t get their benefits. Every single week when I meet with my staff, I hear about the things we’re able to do to make those situations right. How can you not be more idealistic and more optimistic about the power of government as a force for good?
What the accomplishments have you made on council to match your ideals?
I inherited a district that’s the most densely populated in the city of all 15, and it’s the third poorest of all 15. I had 13 parks in my district when I started, and next week we’ll open our 20th new park. [Also] building affordable housing and helping to revitalize some of our best neighborhoods. Hollywood, at the top of that list, was something that was embarrassing to all of us. A neighborhood that is synonymous with Los Angeles, but for years was a hollow shell of itself. It’s now a place where we’ve been able to balance affordable housing, jobs, an entertainment district, and it’s just a cool place to be again! We’ve shown that a neighborhood can roar back, but not move all the people out who were a part of that renaissance.
What is the city budget going to look like this year? Is there going to be room to move the status quo?
It’s a very tough budget year, but we’ve faced budget years equally as tough about four years ago. People don’t know this in Los Angeles, but we have the highest bond rating of any big city in America. But [to keep] that means in a bad budget year we’re going to make cuts, and that’s going to be tough. The telephone tax, I’m optimistic we can continue to keep those services. If [that] passes, it would be a slight reduction, but would insulate city services for decades to come.
This coming year, we’ll be putting an initiative on to fund our anti-gang youth development programs. Even though we have the safest city in 50 years, the youth homicide rate has never declined, and I’ve had to be at vigils for three 14-year-olds in a row in the last three months. When it comes down to that, I think a bad budget year is put in pretty stark relief to the needs that we face, and I have always been amazed at the ways the city can tighten its belt and voters can help close the books.
What belt-tightening are you talking about?
We’ve asked all the city departments to essentially plan for how they would reduce their expenditures by 8 percent this year. If the telephone users tax gets thrown out and we aren’t able to pass Proposition S, that would mean serious cuts in all sorts of non-critical areas.
We’d be prepared though. We have continued to grow our business tax receipts through, ironically, reducing the gross receipts tax on a lot of businesses. We have more businesses that have opened since the Garcetti-Greuel tax reform package went through a couple years ago, which has returned about $100 million to L.A. businesses, and which is finally resulting in people headquartering here, and investing in their businesses, and expanding.
What happened to the Silver Lake DASH?
I just sat down with Rita Robinson, our new general manager, and told her, “You have to figure out a way to get this done.” We can’t build a transit system until we have those local connectors. Every year we wait, we lose money, we have more traffic, we have more pollution. Shame on us if we don’t find a way to expand those DASH lines.
Do you still drive an electric car?
I still do! Nine years and counting in an electric car. I’ve tried to … lead by example, both by driving an electric car myself … Now I drive a Toyota RAV 4 EV, which we successfully got Toyota to keep with the [city’s fleet]. And I mandate that everybody on my staff carpool, bike, walk, or take transit at least one day a week to work. I’m looking at, in the next year, expanding that in the office and maybe even making that policy in the city and inspiring other companies in the region to do the same thing. [That would be] for all city employees potentially, or with private businesses where we say, “You get X break on your business tax if you can show that some threshold of employees do that at least once a week.”
When you look at problems as daunting as, say, traffic in Los Angeles, people feel powerless. They think that it’s going to require huge, bold infrastructure to be constructed over many years with billions of dollars. Well, to me, the most sobering statistic on traffic is, the average car in L.A. has 1.1 passengers. If we had 1.6 passengers per car, traffic would flow again. That doesn’t cost us billions of dollars, but we need the sort of leadership that will incentivize it at the private level and among big employers like the city.
Why is everyone on your staff so nice?
Because I have to enjoy coming to work and be with a bunch of people who enjoy coming to work. We’ll try not to make a big habit of it, but we want to be the friendly face of government.
Published: 12/20/2007
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