Mayor Urges Reforms in Bid to Avert Secession

In a heavily symbolic speech that telegraphed his mounting concern over the San Fernando Valley’s threat to secede, Mayor Richard Riordan on Wednesday pronounced Los Angeles healthy, but warned of a deep crisis in democracy, which he proposed to address through new neighborhood councils and an overhaul of schools.

“Together, let us renew our democracy,” Riordan told an overflow crowd gathered to hear his annual State of the City address at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. “The people of Los Angeles are ready and waiting.”

Riordan, who has governed Los Angeles as a pragmatic businessman for five years, spoke in a different vein Wednesday, reflecting on the state of democracy and arguing that a healthy city and country require leaders who are accountable and citizens who are given the opportunity to succeed. Framing his speech around those twin themes--accountability and opportunity--Riordan unveiled proposals that he said would advance each.

He pressed for neighborhood councils to encourage voter participation. He launched a literacy campaign to teach young children to read. He lashed out at the failure of California schools, an area where Riordan has passion but no power. And throughout, he implicitly nodded to the building secessionist pressure in the Valley, where some residents want to break off from the city altogether.

The result was an unorthodox but warmly received speech, one relatively short on the accomplishments of the past year and conspicuously conscious of the challenges ahead.

Riordan opened his address in a more traditional style. As he often does, the mayor proclaimed Los Angeles “the capital city of the 21st century,” and briefly cited what he sees as his chief accomplishments--from major public works projects to falling crime rates and an improved economy.

“By any measure,” Riordan said, “the state of our city is strong and growing stronger.”

But then the mayor struck a more meditative tone.

“We must ask ourselves: Where are we as a people?” he said, the boisterous audience suddenly quieting. “Where are we as a society?”

As Riordan acknowledged, those are hard questions, not easily answered by measuring crime rates or counting the number of building permits.

“Despite the drop in the crime rate, we are still losing thousands of our children to drugs and gangs,” he said. “Despite the booming economy, we know that the promise of opportunity has been denied to too many. Despite all the indicators of civic and national health, we’ve never had a more cynical attitude toward government.”

Choreographed Finish

The audience sat silently through the mayor’s ruminations on democracy, but at other points it erupted with applause; the mayor was interrupted more than a dozen times. At the speech’s carefully choreographed finish--members of the high school jazz band in front of the stage struck up the music just as Riordan concluded--the audience rose to deliver a standing ovation.

Political reaction was more cautious. Only three of the City Council’s 15 members attended the address--some complained that it was held at an inconvenient time and place, given the council’s regular 10 a.m. meeting on Wednesdays--and afterward two of those who sat through the talk hedged their praise, saying they liked the mayor’s ideas but wanted to know more details.

Councilwoman Laura Chick applauded Riordan’s comments about education and commended him for his determination to influence education policy from the mayor’s office. But she was unconvinced by the mayor’s plan for neighborhood councils.

Similarly, Councilman Richard Alarcon said he was glad Riordan had taken a position on the councils--an idea that has been widely discussed in Los Angeles political circles for more than a year--but he worried that the proposal outlined by the mayor might not go far enough to satisfy Valley residents who want more say in decisions involving their communities.

In his speech, Riordan broadly outlined his view of how the councils would best serve the city and their communities.

Leaders of the groups would be elected annually at town hall meetings across Los Angeles, the mayor said. And, faced with the politically dicey question of how much power to give the groups in the area of land use, Riordan chose a middle course: The councils, he proposed, should have a “strong voice in the land use and planning process” but should not be given veto power over proposed developments.

Riordan proposed creation of the councils through the charter reform process. Two different charter commissions are in the middle of efforts to rewrite the city’s aging constitution, and Riordan’s proposal for neighborhood councils could emerge from that effort as part of a package of reforms that voters ultimately would decide.

At the same time, however, some City Council members are pressing forward with the idea outside of charter reform. Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas has advocated a proposal that would not require charter revisions and therefore might create councils more quickly. “We don’t have two years to waste,” Ridley-Thomas said Wednesday.

Although Riordan’s discussion of neighborhood councils created the most stir at City Hall, his second theme, broadening opportunity for city residents, sounded even deeper chords. Expounding on it, Riordan focused on the subject that has dominated much of his second term even though it falls outside his office’s authority--the need to revamp public education.

Schools to Be Rated

Specifically, Riordan said he was working with UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District to produce an annual report card for every school in the district. The first set of such marks will be issued this June, and Riordan said in an interview after the speech that his office will help publicize the findings.

The report cards, said Riordan, will show each school’s test scores, after-school programs, teacher-student ratios, dropout rates and other information. Similar report cards already are prepared by every school in California, but UCLA will prepare a separate set of evaluations, which the mayor will help disseminate using his official World Wide Web site and the power of his office, according to mayoral aides.

That idea was one in a list of proposals that Riordan offered for improving schools. He also called for expansion of the school day and year, for improved teacher pay, for integration of technology into classrooms, for creation of a national testing program to measure student progress, and for the elimination of so-called social promotions, in which students are passed from grade to grade without mastering the skills required at each level.

None of those ideas are original to Riordan, but Wednesday’s speech marked his most comprehensive and forceful call for educational reform. He said he was offering his proposals because schools in Los Angeles and throughout California have lost their focus on children.

“Every child who comes into this world has a God-given right . . . to a quality education,” Riordan said. “There is no doubt, unfortunately, that we are failing our children, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

Illustrating that point, Riordan clicked off the “horrible facts” about California education. The state, he said, has among the nation’s worst teacher-student ratios, the worst dropout rate in the country, the fewest computers per student and the fewest librarians per student. The state’s fourth-graders, he added, rank the worst in the country in math and reading.

The result, Riordan said, is that in a region where 50,000 multimedia jobs are open, employers have to go “to other countries” to fill them because students educated locally are not up to the task. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Riordan asked.

Ever since his inauguration to a second term last year, Riordan has made education reform a mainstay of his administration--a topic he generally addresses in both economic and moral terms. On Wednesday, as he ticked off his laments with the state of Los Angeles schools, the mayor added another twist. He announced the start of a massive volunteer effort to help the city’s children.

“Let us pledge today to start a Reading Renaissance in Los Angeles,” he said. The goal: to encourage every Los Angeles child in first grade or older to get and carry a library card and to use it to read in his or her home.

Although most of the speech was forward-looking, in both form and substance it emphasized the impact of the Valley’s threatened secession, a move that would leave a devastating mark on Riordan’s legacy. Riordan stressed that he hoped his proposal on neighborhood councils would appease some secession advocates, and he acknowledged that the choice of a Valley site for the speech was not an accident.

“I think the secret to heading off secession by the Valley is to tell them we love them,” he said. “I love the Valley.”

* UNHAPPY CONSTITUENCIES: Call for neighborhood councils is part of effort nationwide to reduce political alienation. B1