L.A. voters are willing to give Garcetti a chance, poll finds

As incoming Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti prepares to take over the city government, residents offered mostly favorable reviews of their new leader in a new USC Price/Los Angeles Times poll.

Garcetti opens his term with a positive, if undefined, public image: 53% of voters viewed him favorably, 17% unfavorably. The rest offered no opinion.

“Garcetti’s still a blank slate with most voters,” said pollster Jeff Harrelson of M4 Strategies, the Republican firm on the bipartisan team that conducted the survey for the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Times.

Many know little about the incoming mayor, he said, but “they’re willing to give him a chance.”

Indeed, at least two-thirds of voters said they were confident in Garcetti’s ability to handle crime and transportation. Most also had faith in his capacity to improve schools and create jobs.

The councilman from Silver Lake will hold an inaugural ceremony at City Hall on Sunday and start work as mayor Monday.

The poll also showed that despite long standing gripes about traffic, schools, housing, and unrepaired streets, Los Angeles voters upbeat about the city’s quality of life and optimistic that after four years with Garcetti as mayor, Los Angeles will be better off than it is today.

Those long-standing gripes aside, solid majorities said they were satisfied with the city’s police, parks, libraries, public transportation, emergency services and healthcare system.

Overall, the poll results suggested a significant mood shift from the deep pessimism that took hold statewide and nationally after the 2008 economic crisis. Today’s voters were split evenly on whether things in Los Angeles were moving in the right direction or were on the wrong track, but even that represented improvement over state and national poll findings in recent years.

In Los Angeles, the recovery has been slow; the unemployment rate still exceeds 10%. Yet job creation ranked second, not first, on voters’ priority list for the mayor and City Council over the next few years, just behind improving the school system.

“There is definitely a sense nationwide that things are trending in the right direction, and the worst is behind us,” said Amy Levin of Benenson Strategy Group, the Democratic firm on the polling team.

On a quality-of-life scale of 1 to 9, the higher the better, nearly half of the city’s voters gave Los Angeles a grade of 7, 8 or 9.

The reasons cited most often were jobs, proximity to family and friends, diversity of the population, entertainment, arts, culture, beaches, parks and the outdoors.

“Angelenos aren’t completely satisfied with life in their city, but by and large they’re very optimistic and very happy,” said poll director Dan Schnur.

ALSO:

In San Francisco, a weekend of gay weddings at City Hall

Poll shows split in approval for outgoing Mayor Villaraigosa

Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to close after 55 years as cultural mecca

michael.finnegan@latimes.com