Many in L.A. Feel Upbeat; Most Still Oppose Secession

Shrugging off dismay over public education and apprehension about the future of the economy, more Los Angeles residents feel upbeat than glum about their city and show little enthusiasm for breaking it up, according to a new Times poll.

Although the city is hardly awash in optimism, the generally positive assessment is in striking contrast to the anxious appraisals of many other Californians.

In Los Angeles, nearly half of those polled said the city is going in the right direction, while a little more than a third think it’s on the wrong track--the exact reverse of how Californians feel about the state as a whole, a possible sign of Los Angeles’ insulation from the ongoing power crunch.

And yet, local residents do not appear to credit Los Angeles officials with the city’s relative sense of security. Public approval ratings for both Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Bernard C. Parks dropped significantly in the last year, suggesting that a controversy-filled 12 months have taken their toll on Los Angeles’ most visible public officials.

Despite those grumblings of discontent with the city leadership, however, poll respondents did not show much interest in proposals to break apart Los Angeles.

Most city residents continue to oppose the various secession efforts, and though the San Fernando Valley’s bid for cityhood enjoys more backing than more nascent campaigns by Hollywood and San Pedro, even the Valley’s effort shows no sign of picking up popular support.

The poll, conducted by telephone from Feb. 24 to March 1, surveyed 1,570 Los Angeles residents, including 1,014 registered voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Riordan Gets Lukewarm Reviews

Nearing the end of his second and final term, Riordan prepares to leave the political stage to lukewarm reviews: In the poll, 44% of those questioned said the mayor who promised to be “tough enough to turn L.A. around” is leaving the city essentially unchanged.

Only 46% of the residents polled approved of Riordan’s performance, down 11 points from a Times poll taken less than a year ago. In the latest poll, 20% said they disapproved of Riordan’s work, with the remainder saying they had no opinion. The mayor’s approval rating among city residents is at its lowest point since 1996.

Riordan, however, is strikingly more popular among voters who are considered likely to go to the polls in the April 10 city election. In that group, 62% approved of Riordan’s leadership, compared with 23% who disapproved.

Yet even among those respondents, about two-thirds want the next mayor to take the city in a new direction--a reminder that the mayor’s personal popularity, long a fact of political life in Los Angeles, has not always translated into support for his policies or candidates.

“If I had to say what did Mayor Riordan do in these last years, outside of Staples Center, I couldn’t really say,” said Paul Finegold, a 44-year-old accountant who lives in West Los Angeles and agreed to a follow-up interview. “There seem to be some glaring problems that aren’t getting any better.”

Riordan does get some credit for improving race relations, with more than half of those polled saying he has done a good job in that arena. Indeed, the city that the mayor governs today is far more content than the riot-torn metropolis he inherited in 1993.

The mayor’s dipping popularity comes after a trying year. Its early months were dominated by the Rampart police scandal and his halting attempts to take command of that issue.

The debate over the LAPD was prolonged by the U.S. Justice Department, which demanded reforms at the threat of a lawsuit, and Riordan fought a losing battle to hold off a consent decree to resolve those talks.

More vividly, the mayor was derided in the fall when he elected to go on a bicycle trip in France, even as Los Angeles was gripped by a transit strike.

The final months of the year saw him in better form, working to reestablish relationships with communities and launching a popular park renovation project that seemed to energize the mayor and his staff.

Woodland Hills resident Adrian Munguia, 54, who runs a special effects company, said he has been disappointed in how Riordan has handled the Rampart scandal and other city challenges.

“Riordan, to me, is just locked into position,” Munguia said. “Change is good. I think a new mayor will address the issues of the police and the [school district].”

Although Riordan’s support has suffered in recent months, the most dramatic fallout from the revelations of police corruption has befallen Parks, whose job approval among Los Angeles residents dropped 13 points in the last year to 37%; the same number registered disapproval with his performance.

The only police chief who has been less popular in recent years is Daryl F. Gates, whose approval rating plummeted after the Rodney King beating in 1991. At its nadir, Gates’ approval rating hit 13%.

While Parks’ standing with the public is at its lowest point to date in his term, residents are split along ethnic lines in their evaluations of the chief, arguably the city’s most recognizable African American official.

Fifty-eight percent of African Americans questioned in the poll said they approved of Parks’ performance, compared with 22% who disapproved. As a group, they gave Parks a rating 24 points higher than whites or Latinos did.

“I grew up in Watts. I know about police corruption,” said Mark Ilef, 40, who owns a printing company in that community. “If Gates was still in charge, we wouldn’t know about Rampart. It would have been underneath the carpet, like all the other corruption. This is the first time we’ve ever officially dealt with it.”

The public’s dipping confidence in Parks, however, has not been reflected in a similarly negative view of the LAPD as a whole. The Police Department’s overall approval rating is slightly up from a year ago to 40%, and three-fourths of respondents said they have faith that most police officers are honest and hard-working.

Judy Austin, a 35-year-old accounting representative who lives in South-Central, called the Rampart scandal “sad” but said it didn’t taint her perception of all police.

“I don’t feel all of them are bad,” she said. “I’m not condemning the whole department for those few.”

Nearly three in five city residents approve of having an independent federal monitor oversee the progress of reform in the LAPD, agreeing that such a step will ensure change in the department. Riordan and Parks bitterly fought that idea for months before reluctantly conceding that the Justice Department would not accept a deal that did not include outside monitoring.

Creeping Anxiety About the Future

Though many Los Angeles residents appear to be content with their finances and the quality of life in their communities, the poll also revealed signs of creeping anxiety about the future.

The percentage of respondents who said the city is headed in the right direction slipped eight points in the last two years, dipping from 53% to 45%. And although 67% described their personal finances as secure, the same proportion said it is “likely” that Los Angeles will face an economic recession in the next year, even though more than three-fourths of those surveyed said the city’s economy is doing well today.

Gangs and other crime-related issues top people’s list of the most important challenges facing the city, followed by education and traffic.

“This isn’t the vibrant L.A. that I came to,” said Thomas Kempton, a 54-year-old building inspector in Westchester who moved here more than a decade ago. “I don’t want to go as many places because of the traffic and the crime.”

There are other signs of malaise clouding the public’s view of life in Los Angeles:

* More than half of those surveyed rated the quality of their children’s public education as inadequate or very poor, a state of affairs that Riordan has condemned. However, that number dropped since it was last measured in a March 1999 Times poll, and the proportion of people who called the quality of public education excellent or adequate went up 10 points.

* More than half said race relations in the city are poor or not good, unchanged from a year ago. However, that feeling is dramatically better than the pessimistic mood about race that dominated the city when Riordan took office in 1993. At that time, about eight in 10 residents said ethnic tension was high.

* Two in five residents said Los Angeles’ growing immigrant population is bad for the city, compared with 31% who thought it is good and 20% who said it has had no effect.

* Almost half thought their neighborhoods are getting shortchanged in services from the city, with street maintenance, police, infrastructure and education listed as the top four concerns.

And yet, all of those issues combined still have not brought much support to the most widely debated proposal for addressing the city’s ills: the proposed secession of the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and San Pedro.

Even after years of debating that question, more Los Angeles voters oppose breaking up the city than support it, a slight hardening of disapproval over the last two years.

In the Valley, home of the most developed secession movement, nearly six in 10 said they don’t get enough city services for their tax money, but barely half of voters would back creating their own city.

Among those who support secession, local control and the quality of municipal services are often-cited reasons.

“I think we would be better off in smaller areas where we had more control and our issues would be taken care of,” said Theresa Eberst, a 70-year-old Catholic nun who lives in Sylmar.

Valley voters draw the line at having to pay more for those privileges, however. They are more strongly opposed to raising taxes to support a new municipality than even voters elsewhere in Los Angeles.

And the survey found little support for secession among voters in Hollywood and San Pedro.

Voters who opposed breaking up the city most often cited their fear that they would lose a shared sense of community with their neighbors.

That sense is already being tested in Los Angeles, sometimes in subtle ways that escape much public notice. The poll found, in fact, that although city residents generally believe that Los Angeles is in good shape, African Americans are far more downbeat about local institutions and pessimistic about the future.

Black residents are more likely to say race relations need work, and more than half said the city’s growing immigrant population is bad for the city.

The effects of Latino immigration are being most profoundly felt in areas that once were home to the city’s African American culture and political strength--raising quiet fears of ethnic political realignment, particularly in South-Central.

On a more personal level, the collision between the two cultures has caused interracial conflict: Many African Americans have expressed fear of being pushed out of their homes and jobs, and many new immigrants have said they feel they aren’t welcomed by their new neighbors.

In the new poll, some of the city’s ethnic divisions are reflected in the way residents view the successes or failures of their children’s schools.

Even though they are less likely than other groups to support breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District, seven in 10 blacks said their children’s public education is inadequate or poor.

Among whites, by contrast, just 54% said the schools were failing, compared with 28% who called them adequate or excellent. Latinos, who make up the bulk of the district’s enrollment, were the most satisfied with the education it provides: 53% said the schools were doing well, while 40% said they were not succeeding.

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Associate poll director Jill Darling Richardson contributed to this story.