Los Angeles is facing a $242 million deficit—next year it could be more—plus thanks to the previous Mayor, Phony Tony, the city added billions in bonded indebtedness. Yet city streets look like a bombed out city, traffic is mostly gridlocked on the main streets and the cost of parking means only the rich can pay—or the middle class takes out a loan.
Tony spent his term not being Mayor, but trying to run the government schools—not his responsibility. Maybe he did not really want to be Mayor? Under his activism the cost of schools went up and now has a lawsuit for civil rights violations—mostly because they fired good teachers and kept bad ones. Even the new Superintendent testified in Federal court that was abusive of the children—thank Tony.
“With the so-called greening of L.A., Villaraigosa pushed forward a “clean trucks” program at the Port of Los Angeles, which requires diesel trucks to meet tough environmental standards and has decreased air pollution at the nation’s largest port. But Villaraigosa also signed off on Teamster-friendly rules that made it very difficult for independent truckers to work at the port. Those rules have been challenged in federal court. Villaraigosa also announced a plan for L.A. to stop using coal-fired power by 2025. It sounded great, but as with many of his grand plans, it’s too early to say if that will actually happen.”
Who Fixed Los Angeles?
Not former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, say his fiercest critics.
By PATRICK RANGE MCDONALD, Politico, 3/5/14
A year-long reported series from Politico Magazine, featuring innovative ideas—and how they spread—from cities across the United States at a time of unprecedented urban reinvention.
Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013, wants to be remembered as the guy who brought mass transit to L.A., who smashed crime—and finally gave the city a real downtown. He is all about his legacy.
A relentless self-promoter who is now an appointed professor at the University of Southern California, Villaraigosa will soon be lecturing students about the fine details of managing a world-famous metropolis and, after years of covering—and tangling with—his administration, I have no doubt his planned memoir about leading the nation’s second-largest city will be a hoot.
But the twisting of Villaraigosa’s past was well underway before he handed over the keys to Eric Garcetti, L.A.’s 43-year-old “hipster mayor” whose father, Gil Garcetti, infamously lost the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial as the Los Angeles County district attorney.
In the weeks leading up to Villaraigosa’s departure in June 2013, political supporters constantly banged the drum that under the mayor’s watch L.A. had become safer, that he improved public transportation infrastructure and that he pushed forward a successful “green” agenda. Some of which is loosely true.
How true? Although crime dropped across the country over the past eight years, and Villaraigosa and the LAPD made a nonsensical claim that L.A. was as safe today as it was in 1956, the mayor did expand the police department to a little more than 10,000 sworn officers and violent crimes such as homicides and rape declined around 40 percent during his two terms.
In 2008, Los Angeles County voters approved a half-cent sales hike for 30 years in the form of Measure R, which Villaraigosa had furiously campaigned for. The tens of billions raised through that increase will go toward much-needed transportation projects and improvements, such as new bus operations, better freeways and, more controversially, rail lines. Villaraigosa and his supporters often claim that the passage of Measure R was due to the mayor’s political wizardry. But the initiative just barely got the green light from taxpayers and a large crush of young people showed up to the polls to vote for Barack Obama, not Villaraigosa, and helped to put Measure R over the top.
With the so-called greening of L.A., Villaraigosa pushed forward a “clean trucks” program at the Port of Los Angeles, which requires diesel trucks to meet tough environmental standards and has decreased air pollution at the nation’s largest port. But Villaraigosa also signed off on Teamster-friendly rules that made it very difficult for independent truckers to work at the port. Those rules have been challenged in federal court. Villaraigosa also announced a plan for L.A. to stop using coal-fired power by 2025. It sounded great, but as with many of his grand plans, it’s too early to say if that will actually happen.
Villaraigosa, who had strong connections to wealthy real estate developers, was particularly proud of changes in downtown L.A., although numerous homeless advocates believed he forgot them and their clients in the process—a story Ed Leibowitz tells here.
Always given to hyperbole, the mayor said weeks before he left office at a park opening in downtown, “Not since the late 1940s have you seen the resurgence of downtown, the activity downtown that you see today. More and more people are living here, working here, shopping here and they want open space just like everyone else.”
From his view at the White House, President Barack Obama called Villaraigosa “one of the finest leaders we have in this country.” But that’s not exactly how it looks to many Angelenos.
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Villaraigosa’s actual legacy boils down to three things: deep disappointment, unrealized potential and brazen betrayal.
In 2005, Villaraigosa, a liberal Democrat who grew up poor in Los Angeles’s hard-scrabbled Eastside, graduated from UCLA in L.A.’s affluent Westside, and turned into a political powerhouse as the speaker of the California State Assembly, strode into office talking about a gleaming future for all Angelenos. “Join me, Los Angeles,” Villaraigosa famously said during his inauguration speech. “Dream with me, Los Angeles. And work with me to fulfill our dreams.”
As the first Latino mayor in L.A.’s modern history, Villaraigosa was warmly embraced by janitors, movie stars and influential politicians alike. At his inaugural ceremony, former Vice President Al Gore, California governor and action film hero Arnold Schwarzenegger and labor icon Dolores Huerta, among many other luminaries, were in attendance. Over the next eight years, however, Villaraigosa would go on to let down nearly everybody.
The first major disappointment and betrayal took place in 2007 when Villaraigosa admitted to having an extramarital affair with a local TV reporter, Mirthala Salinas. Villaraigosa took a lower profile for the rest of the year, separated from his wife of 20 years and heard occasional boos and catcalls at public events. More ugliness followed.
In 2008, as a staff writer for L.A. Weekly, the city’s alternative newspaper, I examined Villaraigosa’s schedule for a 10-week period on a hunch that he was out of town way too often to do any real work. That guess was correct, but unsettlingly so.
The fame-seeking mayor not only wasted an hour posing for a statue of himself for Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, but 34 percent of his official workload was spent on traveling to such far-flung places as Israel, Hawaii and London and raising money for himself in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.
Another 24 percent of his workload was spent on “gap time,” which largely consisted of the time it took to travel from one public relations event to another in his LAPD-chauffeured SUV. Ten percent of his workload involved attending staged press conferences, prepping for press conferences and taking media interviews. Only 11 percent of his time was utilized for handling important city business, such as meetings with department managers and his chief of staff.
For the article (“The All-About-Me Mayor”), former L.A. Daily News editor Ron Kaye, who has covered Los Angeles politics for decades and rails against City Hall corruption as a blogger today, told me, “After three years, it’s pretty clear how Antonio has used the office. For him, it’s ceremonial, and he’s the public face of City Hall, instead of being a guy who rolls up his sleeves and gets down to the nitty-gritty. He made the wrong choice. He made the choice to look after his own interests.”
Patrick Range McDonald is an investigative journalist and former staff writer at L.A. Weekly. McDonald helped former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan write his memoir and is now working on a book about the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
