THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Stuck on Fast Forward
The L.A. mayor's mad rush to fix the city's problems.
LOS ANGELES--On Saturdays, City Hall is so deserted that it's difficult to gain entry to chat with the suddenly controversial Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, even if you're expected. As I peer through a security checkpoint, awaiting some kind of sign from two stern Latina guards, I can see the motionless doors of the Art Deco elevators that rise to the mayor's third-floor chambers. The silence is oppressive. Is anybody out fighting crime and fixing potholes?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. The mayor, trim and handsome, with dimples and soft black lashes that make some women swoon, breezes in with his ever-present "body man," and we settle into his luxurious, art-filled office. Mr. Villaraigosa puts in more overtime than the city employees whose pensions are L.A.'s next lurking fiscal crisis. He's driven by an unspoken--and officially denied--sense that if he doesn't buzz, yak, visit, inveigh, order, arrive, depart, condemn and celebrate at the speed of light, Los Angeles will crack under the many pressures upon it.
He alone, his pace suggests, can stop the creeping decline in litter-strewn neighborhoods jammed with illegal immigrants, or end the tragedy of extreme high school dropout rates, or patch up dirty business districts that make beach-seeking tourists wonder if they took a wrong turn in Jersey.
"Today," Mr. Villaraigosa says, "I attended a Police Protective League event in Palm Springs, came back to this interview, then to Dodger Stadium to play in a celebrity baseball tournament, where I will meet the president of the Dominican Republic. Then I'm going to receive a Vision Award at the Beverly Wilshire, then back to the L.A. Press Club awards, then I am going to introduce Al Gore at the California Plaza to premier his 'Inconvenient Truth' movie. Then I'm going to an event sponsored by Culture Clash, an artistic group giving an award to my family."
He grins, displaying perfect teeth. "I started at 5 a.m. This is a Saturday."
Mr. Villaraigosa, former union organizer, state assemblyman, speaker of the assembly and city councilman, sleeps 3.5 hours nightly and is an over-exerciser. "I do an hour of cardio daily, and one hour on an elliptical machine. I do about 600 crunches every day, but yesterday I did 800. Alternate days, I do 300 pushups, but yesterday I worked out twice and did 500."He grabs for his ceramic mug of green tea as if it were a life preserver. He believes that drinking lots of green tea--"antioxidants"--is a folk remedy for staying healthy.
Until he got hit hard by the worst press of his first year in office--pilloried by parents, teachers, reformers and newspapers for his compromise plan to take control of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which educates one in every 12 children in California--Mr. Villaraigosa was riding his endorphins-and-antioxidants high to seemingly good places. He hammered out an early deal with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had brought crippling strikes to the city three times in 12 years. He reduced the deficit $47 million while funding more cops, albeit with a really nasty, 154%, $204 annual hike in homeowner trash fees to be phased in over four years. He's making dual plays for L.A.'s consideration as the Olympic site for 2016 and as the next NFL franchise.
Mr. Villaraigosa has traveled to New York to see how Mayor Michael Bloomberg runs his schools, and to Chicago to see how Mayor Richard Daley does it there. And he's getting sick of partisanship, even in himself: "It's just not practical enough. When you are the mayor of a big city you don't have the luxury. It's like running a country. This is the 16th or 17th largest economy in the world." And so he has urged leading Democrats to talk about faith and get fiscally prudent "because I don't know who is a conservative anymore." He focuses on "good government," like his ban on road construction at rush hour and his pledge to promptly fill potholes, to the tune of 286,000 jobs per year.
Oh? I mention a bad four-inch pavement drop-off in my area, in front of a boxy peach rambler (sale price: $1 million). Should I call it in? The mayor enthusiastically bobs his noggin. "No, tell me now! I'm serious. Tell me right now! Where is it? Where's it at?" I tell him. He turns to spokeswoman Janelle Erickson: "I am giving this to Areen [the "body man" who handles his minutiae] to have it done Monday by close of business."
But no; it's filled by Sunday afternoon. Was it for show? The following weekend, I call the 311 public services line anonymously, reporting two potholes in a beat-up working class area. By Monday night, they're filled, as are several cracks and dips.
But none of his mayoral efforts so far compares to charging into the Education Wars. Was he pushed by billionaire pal Eli Broad, a bricks-and-mortar schools construction type? By his wife, a "bilingual coordinator" in tiny Montebello Unified School District, which should have charged past LAUSD years ago, but resisted reform and lags behind? Or, I ask the mayor, did he dream all this?
"Nooo. None of those!" he cries. "You know where it really came from? . . . I started going out to these schools, to Jefferson High School and Taft High School," and other racially tense schools. Mr. Villaraigosa set up peer group mediation and alternative dispute resolution between students, finding 2,000 new mentors for kids. He drops to a stage whisper. "You know I was a high school dropout. I got kicked out. I see these kids, they're going to drop out. Their likelihood of success if they drop out--it's not great. And over time, I began to say, you know what? I am going to take this issue on."
Until recently, he was winning the PR campaign. LAUSD bureaucrats have utterly failed to delineate their substantial success turning around bad elementary schools, after 25 years of decline. Before the indefatigable superintendent Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado, arrived in 2001, disastrous superintendents--Ruben Zacarias, Sid Thompson and others--kowtowed to United Teachers Los Angeles. Under constant union pressure, the citywide curriculum grew steadily simpler and stupider.
Yet all spring, Mr. Villaraigosa minimized Mr. Romer's surprising progress, which has L.A. schools improving faster than in richer San Francisco. He uses terms like "stagnating," and "stultified," to describe the still-rising elementary school test scores, and hammers on the teen dropout rates. Mr. Romer, retiring this year and deserving better, publicly slammed Mr. Villaraigosa's plans. The mayor shrugs: "Think what a guy like Roy Romer could do if he had more authority. And here in my office, he has told me he supports mayoral oversight. In my office, as God is my witness, he told me that. So it is surprising to see him get out there and oppose me."
Mr. Villaraigosa proposed a new law giving him power to hire the superintendent and strip day-to-day decisions from the union-dominated L.A. school board, consolidating authority under the superintendent. But having alienated Mr. Romer, he made another, bigger misstep. In late June, he huddled behind closed doors with the teachers' union and Democratic lawmakers--people with zilch track record in school reform--emerging with a compromise plan that critics blasted for obscuring accountability and letting the unions meddle in curriculum.
"Did you see the [Los Angeles] Daily News saying today I had changed the proposal?" he asks. "That's not true. And from Day One I have told the L.A. Times, you can't write an editorial until you see the legislation. They wrote the editorial as if the teachers had ultimate say over curriculum. . . . They only get to participate at local school sites, as they should!"
L.A. schools are jammed with a massive influx of mostly Mexican children whose (often) illegal immigrant parents don't speak English. (Many middle-class kids, including Mr. Villaraigosa's own, attend private school.) Some 43% of LAUSD kids must learn English from scratch, and more pour in monthly, tamping down the gains in test scores by other Latino students. Nothing remotely like it occurs in Chicago or in New York, where only about 14% of students are non-English speakers. Mr. Romer, like an affable Marine, requires immigrant students to take the standardized tests. In New York, many immigrant kids are permitted to vanish on testing day, thus inflating the city's scores.
Will Mr. Villaraigosa reach out to the local reformers he has thus far shunned? "Yes, I want partnership with them! Who are these people? Do you mean the administrators?" When I give names, he recognizes not one. It's a conundrum. He's afire to fix the schools, but hasn't done his homework. He's acting while his popularity still buys something, before the inevitable downturns. "I've got political capital right now," Mr. Villaraigosa says. "And I'm not always going to have it, you know? Even if it means I will expend more than I'd like, I'm going to expend it."
Mr. Villaraigosa is a good man; he might become a great mayor. But the school constituency is not unions and Democrats. It's students, parents and taxpayers/society. What if, in his mad rush to fix L.A., he fails in this, and drags his beloved city-state down a notch? Maybe he needs more sleep. Maybe he shouldn't listen to his wife. Maybe he shouldn't have as his education adviser Thomas Saenz, a leftist attorney who sued LAUSD to stop English immersion and keep kids in Spanish for years--and thankfully lost.
But Mr. Villaraigosa is not a man to take advice. "I hold my counsel pretty close, and I always have," he says. "My friends made fun of me about that even when I was speaker. I listen to a lot of people and then I make a decision." (His aide, Cathy Finley, interrupts to say that the Dodgers lineup is at 5 p.m., and he's expected there, at bat.)
This month, Mr. Villaraigosa is very busy. He's launching a renovation of LAX, the nation's busiest destination airport, after a long battle he helped to resolve. And while he dashes about on pressing matters, he'd like the city's inhabitants to just plain trust him.
"What I am trying to do is be an honest broker in all these situations, and someone whose integrity is beyond reproach, so I have the credibility to solve the problems." Regarding the schools, he says, "Once I win the fight to be a participant, then we are going to bring in everyone. Because I got to!"
Ms. Stewart is a syndicated columnist.
