Mayoral mid-term
Two years ago, when The Times endorsed Eric Garcetti for mayor, we described him as the candidate with the most potential to lead Los Angeles into a more sustainable and confident future. But we had concerns too: Garcetti should not confuse constructive compromise with the path of least resistance. He should not try to be “all things to all people.” We worried that he was “hard to pin down” and called him “a bit of a Zelig.” ¶ Today, unfortunately, our concerns are becoming reality. Midway through his first term, Garcetti remains as appealing and articulate as ever, but his inclination to avoid tough or controversial decisions is undermining his ability to address the very serious problems facing the city.
Garcetti has presented a vision of Los Angeles as a more livable, transit-oriented, environmentally and technologically friendly city, served by a more efficient, customer-oriented government. This is a good vision, and he is an eloquent spokesman for it. But what has he done to achieve it? So far, not much.
Garcetti said repeatedly on the campaign trail that job creation would be his top priority. After all, the city has never recovered the middle-class jobs it lost over the last three decades with the shrinking of the aerospace and manufacturing sectors. Immediately upon taking office, he announced a nationwide search for a deputy mayor for economic development. But in the end, he chose to surround himself with political allies rather than nationally recognized experts, hiring his longtime council staffer for the deputy mayor position and putting former Councilwoman Jan Perry in charge of the Economic and Workforce Development Department. Two years later, unsurprisingly, the mayor has yet to articulate a comprehensive job creation strategy.
And after signing into law a modest break for just the highest-earning firms, he’s all but dropped his campaign promise to completely eliminate the city’s business tax, even though companies say it’s the chief reason they won’t locate in Los Angeles. This is how he leads on his No. 1 priority?
Likewise, the mayor laid out what he called a “back to basics” agenda aimed at restoring city services that had been slashed or ignored. However, he killed a sales tax proposal to fund street resurfacing and sidewalk fixes, and he’s never offered an alternative proposal to pay for the multibillion-dollar backlog of repairs. He has set an ambitious and worthy goal of reducing the city’s dependence on imported water, which will require enormously expensive investments in cleaning contaminated groundwater, recycling wastewater and capturing stormwater instead of letting it flow to the ocean. Yet last month, when the Department of Water and Power proposed raising rates to help pay for infrastructure replacement, Garcetti played coy, saying, “Before I agree on an exact amount of an increase, I want to hear what our customers have to say and get the analysis from our ratepayer advocate.” Of course, this is insincere. Garcetti appointed all the DWP commissioners and hired (and can fire) the DWP’s general manager. Garcetti’s office was involved in developing the rate proposal. He should make an honest case about the city’s infrastructure needs and what it will take to pay for them.
He should be equally focused on controlling labor and pension expenses. Angelenos have seen the impact of cuts in services and decaying infrastructure due, in part, to increased spending on pension and retirement benefits for city workers, which now consume 20% of the general fund (four times what they did in 2002). The mayor on Wednesday announced an agreement with a coalition of city labor unions that he asserts will address this crisis. It may be a step in the right direction, but it’s impossible to know because full details will remain unavailable to the public until after the contract is ratified.
It’s not as if these are new issues for Garcetti, who served 12 years on the City Council and was its president from 2006 to 2011. He bears some responsibility for the current state of affairs and can’t claim to be shocked by the magnitude of the city’s problems.
When Garcetti chooses to lead on an issue, he can be effective. Amid growing concern about police shootings, he pushed the Los Angeles Police Department to outfit every officer in the field with a body camera by mid-2016. He helped negotiate a deal to build a rail connection to Los Angeles International Airport. He has promised to end years of inaction on earthquake safety, and he is lobbying the council to enact laws by the end of the year to require that thousands of vulnerable buildings be retrofitted, though there are still important details to be worked out, including where the money will come from.
Too often, Garcetti is unwilling to speak out unless he knows it will be good for him politically. The result is that he has sat out some significant debates in which the mayor should be heard. He refused to take a position, for instance, on whether the city should consolidate local elections with state and federal elections (even though he said as a candidate that he opposed the idea). He was one of the few big-city mayors who stayed silent during the debate over giving trade deals a fast-track approval process, even though major deals such as the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership will affect L.A.’s port and growing logistics industry. He refused to either sign or veto a controversial ordinance on homelessness. And on the eve of the Police Commission’s meeting to decide whether officers were justified in shooting a mentally ill, unarmed black man, Garcetti ignored protesters at his residence and tried to slip out the back, purportedly for critical meetings at the White House but really to attend a D.C. fundraiser.
Garcetti’s silence on public education has been particularly galling. Unlike his predecessors Richard Riordan and Antonio Villaraigosa, he has mostly stayed out of school district politics and governance. L.A.’s public schools are responsible for educating more than 600,000 children. The mayor cannot lead the city to a better future without using his bully pulpit to offer policy suggestions, support or oppose school board candidates, and find new ways to coordinate city services with student needs.
Garcetti has a good vision for Los Angeles. But to be a leader, he has to be willing to make hard, unpopular decisions for the greater good of the city. He should start by surrounding himself with respected, battle-tested experts rather than political loyalists. He must present an effective economic development policy. He needs to address the business tax, which is hurting L.A.’s ability to attract and retain companies. He has asked city departments to use data and metrics to track the delivery of services, and now he needs to fix the broken systems as he finds them. Can DWP deliver reliable water and power at affordable prices? Are Fire Department response times too slow, and are its recruitment practices fair and effective? How should the police respond to the worrisome 21% increase in violent crime during the first half of the year? What about the structural imbalance in the budget due to the increase in retirement costs?
Solving these problems will take political courage and decisiveness, not a finger in the wind.