Team Riordan Shaping Up for a Season of Hardball : City Hall: The Three Bills lead the way as major issues loom. Some view shaky start as spring training jitters.
Behind the scenes in the Los Angeles mayor’s suite, Team Riordan, an energetic, largely untested crew, is taking shape under an impatient businessman who tosses off ideas like a popcorn machine and a powerful troika of advisers dubbed the Three Bills.
As Richard Riordan’s summer honeymoon fades and the appetite for meaningful mayoral action grows, attention is turning to the nascent organization charged with advancing the new mayor’s ambitious agenda.
The Riordan squad, after seven relatively quiet weeks of organizing, will confront its first major challenges in the coming weeks as the mayor unveils a potentially contentious budget balancing scheme, begins clarifying plans for a rapid buildup of the Los Angeles Police Department and confronts the threat of an Indian Summer strike by city power workers.
“We’re all waiting for that first football to be put on the field,” said one veteran City Hall aide who has been watching the team take shape.
Though he promised quick, dramatic action, Riordan has yet to advance a significant policy initiative or legislative package. “It’s taken a while to start,” said a source. “They’re trying to blend together different personalities who’ve never worked together before. That just doesn’t happen overnight.”
Indeed, the mayor’s staff, made up mostly of newcomers to City Hall, finds itself struggling with turf issues, steep learning curves, long hours and what one deputy mayor called an “astronomical” amount of paperwork, according to dozens of interviews with Riordan aides, advisers and other observers.
Overcoming those hurdles will be particularly important to this mayor, a restless former venture capitalist with a penchant for delegation and little tolerance for the tedious plodding of governance.
“Dick always did best with the big picture . . . the tough issues at the end of the line (rather) than the nitty-gritty of detail,” said Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley, an attorney who worked with Riordan for 12 years in private practice.
Riordan has helped set a dizzying pace for his staff. He scoops up ideas wherever he goes, whenever he picks up the phone, and laterals them to staff. On matters ranging from a stalled bikeway project to a strategy to massively overhaul the city minority contracting guidelines, aides say Riordan pops into their offices, rings them up at home or buttonholes them in the hallway to see what can be done.
“There’s no doubt he has more ideas per unit of time than any other person,” said longtime Riordan adviser William Ouchi, now a special consultant to the mayor.
The 63-year-old Riordan acknowledges his impatience and a tendency to “burn up” those working around him, but he expressed confidence that his team is up to the task. He says he is applying proven business theories that encourage “management by wandering” and executives who are “not problem solvers, but problem finders.”
“I’m going to run the city well,” he said in an interview.
Initially, his team has won general praise for openness, eagerness and aptitude. “They are involved. They are more visible than the Bradley people were,” said Cindy Miscikowski, chief deputy to Councilman Marvin Braude.
But interviews and observations show Riordan’s aides have not yet broken through a difficult period of adjustment. Straining under six- and seven-day weeks, they are still hiring support staffs, juggling orientation briefings with city managers and community leaders, dealing with arcane day-to-day administrative matters and trying to package major initiatives to fulfill Riordan’s three main goals--more police, more jobs and less red tape.
“I’m feeling it,” said Deputy Mayor Jadine Nielsen, who is in charge of legislative and administrative matters, as she waved over two large desks covered with reports, memos and Post-it Notes. “Look at all the paper.”
“This is a tough beast to control,” said one source familiar with the workings of the office. “The number of problems that exist grow each day rather than diminish.”
Part of the problem is the entire structure of the mayor’s office has changed and responsibility for various functions is still being sorted out. In fact, no official organizational chart has been released yet.
Still, a clear two-tiered hierarchy of authority and influence has emerged.
At the top is the triumvirate of the Three Bills--Chief of Staff William McCarley, management expert Ouchi and Riordan’s close business and political confidante, William Wardlaw.
Drawn into all major decisions, they form a powerful technical, philosophical and political brain trust for Riordan. Even the floor plan of the mayor’s inner sanctum reflects their standing.
Tucked in a small office on one side of the mayor is Ouchi, a UCLA professor on leave from teaching duties, as well as an author and longtime Riordan sounding board. As special consultant, he is leading several broad reviews to streamline government, put more police on the streets and improve the city’s business climate.
“Ouchi is the big thinker,” said a knowledgeable source. “He can graze far (and) has an advantage of his own long, long relationship with the mayor. The mayor respects and trusts him.”
Riordan can frequently be seen huddling with Ouchi in or near his large, ornate office overlooking City Hall’s south lawn. “I’m not a decision-maker,” Ouchi said. “I’m a trainer, maybe. . . . Wherever there are issues of organization and management, I am involved.”
On the other side of Riordan’s office is McCarley, the seasoned career city bureaucrat who is stewarding day-to-day operations and trying to bolt down practical legislative proposals. “I’m the practitioner,” McCarley said.
He also functions as a counterweight to Riordan’s anxiousness. “Bill tells me to relax,” the mayor said.
“I believe the Administration’s biggest enemy in the early stages is impatience,” McCarley said. “We need to get in shape and bring well-thought-out, systematic recommendations for change to the City Council. And you don’t do that in 30 or 60 days.”
Despite City Hall rumblings that Riordan is growing frustrated with McCarley’s pace, both men indicate that the relationship is working well.
Aloft over the entire mayoral operation is Wardlaw. Working from his investment firm’s Westside office, the mayor’s trusted former campaign chairman and transition chief remains closer to Riordan than anyone--even though he is not on the payroll. Involved in most key staff and commission appointments, Wardlaw is in regular contact with McCarley and others in the office, providing political and strategic counsel.
“Bill has a critical role,” said deputy mayor Keeley, who has worked with Riordan and Wardlaw over the years. “He certainly has as good a sense of political instinct as anyone here.”
The diffusion of power at the top contrasts sharply with the latter years of Mayor Tom Bradley’s reign, when influence was largely concentrated in a single deputy. In the Bradley era, Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani and his predecessors were seen by many as Svengalilike figures quietly masterminding virtually all political and policy matters.
“It is an eclectic mix and it’s purposely that way,” McCarley said. “It reflects the mayor’s style. What he’s looking for is different kinds of skill and experience and bringing them together.”
The second tier of aides--officially reporting to McCarley but also interacting directly with the mayor, Ouchi and Wardlaw--is Riordan’s staff of five deputy mayors.
These deputies have been given an array of duties, from developing legislative programs to providing aggressive oversight of the various sections of the city bureaucracy.
They have taken a more hands-on approach than was seen during the Bradley era. But that has, at least initially, immersed the deputies in huge amounts of raw information that previously would have been filtered through city analysts and department heads.
A Times reporter recently sat in with mayoral aides as they went about their daily business. A morning session involving Deputy Mayor Bill Violante provided a window into some of the minutiae that is crowding their schedules. With his aides, Violante, who oversees public safety and social services, waded through issues ranging from a Police Department contract for helmets to how the city can better publicize legitimate charities.
Riordan says he has assembled the “most talented group of deputy mayors this city has ever seen.”
But some City Hall watchers have voiced skepticism about his judgment. They cite his selection of former police union chief Violante--once an archrival of popular Police Chief Willie L. Williams--to oversee police matters. Eyebrows were also raised after disclosures about a lawsuit settled last year over $30,000 in gambling debts run up by Deputy Mayor Alfred Villalobos, who is in charge of business issues.
Other choices, notably Keeley, who is charged with squeezing money and improved service out of the bureaucracy, appear to have brought bright, fresh talent to City Hall, officials say.
“Anybody who’s had a chance to deal with (Keeley) is very impressed,” said Jack Driscoll, general manager of the Department of Airports. “He is extremely quick and cuts through the baloney to the issues.”
As Team Riordan warms up, some see troubling signs of turf overlap and a sort of free-lance power building among top mayoral advisers and deputies.
“In my opinion, there’s a whole lot of confusion,” one Riordan adviser said privately. “You have people . . . who have their own agenda and the structure seems set up to maximize conflict.”
A City Hall source who has worked with the new mayor and his aides said: “Riordan’s attention span is zero. When you have a guy like that . . . if you don’t have some kind of centralized command, things are going to get out of hand. It’s not yet structured for the galvanizing of a team in one direction.”
McCarley, while officially in charge, does not yet appear to have complete control of the deputy mayors and top advisers, most of whom he did not hire, some well-placed observers said. “I think Bill’s sort of overwhelmed with where he fits in,” said a City Hall colleague who has worked with him for years.
By some accounts, there also has been confusion and subtle internal tension over some responsibilities, including such key areas as media relations and dealings with the City Council.
McCarley, a 27-year City Hall veteran with strong ties to council offices, and Nielsen, one of the City Hall newcomers who managed Riordan’s campaign, have been dividing liaison duties with the City Council. Other deputy mayors have also been working directly with council members and their staffs on issues that fall in their bailiwicks.
As a result, one source said, there was initial confusion over who had primary responsibility for securing support for the confirmation of controversial Latino activist Xavier Hermosillo, nominated by Riordan to the Fire Commission. The matter fell into the territory of at least three deputy mayors: council liaison Nielsen, public safety specialist Violante and chief of staff McCarley. After unanimous disapproval by a council committee, followed by several days of hectic lobbying by Riordan and his aides, Hermosillo’s nomination was rejected Friday, handing the new mayor his first major defeat.
“I never had a call from the mayor or anyone on his staff until after the committee vote,” said one council member. “That’s too late. The opposition was lobbying for two weeks.”
There also has been strain, sources say, over the role and placement of the mayor’s media operation.
Initially reporting to Nielsen, the operation recently was shifted to McCarley. Sources said key Riordan advisers think the mayor, while heavily booked in talk shows and public appearances, has put out a message that was too flat, repetitive and reactive during the Administration’s formative weeks.
A search is on for an experienced communications director who would report to McCarley and help plot media and political strategy for the important battles ahead, sources say. Other Riordan advisers fear that such an addition could exacerbate the organizational problems.
McCarley downplayed reports of internal tensions, saying they were speculative and overblown. “I think it’s coalescing fine,” he said. “We’re a spring training team, and we’re bumping into each other and running around, but that’s normal.”
McCarley said everyone reports to him, but he has not discouraged subordinates from acting independently. “I’m not a control freak,” he said.
McCarley denied that the Hermosillo nomination was initially bobbled, although he acknowledged “nobody was the ‘point person.’ . . . We will all interact with the council functionally and territorially.” He also said the intent always was to bring the press operation under him and the shift does not reflect dissatisfaction.
As Riordan and McCarley frequently point out, the ultimate test of the office will be how it performs.
Some fast-approaching issues could provide the first proving grounds. As early as this week, Riordan will hand the City Council a budget balancing plan for the current year, and aides are quietly billing it as a defining document. It will go well beyond the $40 million immediately needed, and strongly signal Riordan’s intent to rearrange spending priorities, emphasizing public safety, aides said. The proposal could put him at odds with entrenched City Hall interests and some elected officials whose pet programs might be in for cuts, advisers say.
Also closing in quickly on businessman Riordan is his first showdown with powerful public employee unions. Denied pay increases, the union representing thousands of line workers in the Department of Water and Power is preparing to walk out as early as September. A strike could lead to widespread power outages and plunge the Riordan team into its first full-blown crisis, officials say.
And Police Chief Williams will deliver a study to Riordan next week outlining options for expanding the police force--increasing pressure on the mayor to specify how he will come up with the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to deliver on his pledge to add 3,000 officers in four years.
“We have some serious problems (and) we’re getting prepared,” McCarley said. “You’re going to have to judge us by our performance when we deal with them.”
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