The Dimming of Power in the Mayor’s Office

I’m one of the few reporters still around who covered the last wide-open, free-for-all mayoral election.

Most of the current journalists, and the campaign advisers who provide them with information, were watching “Sesame Street,� “Captain Kangaroo� and “The Brady Bunch� when I was reporting the 1973 race for mayor.

Occasionally these youths ask me what the mayoral campaign was like in those distant days, when people wrote with typewriters and communicated without faxes. Twenty years of traumatic history have passed, and 1973 has slipped into a far corner of my mind. But I understand their curiosity. The year was a turning point in Los Angeles history, just as 1993 promises to be.

Tom Bradley was elected mayor in 1973, a time when the city’s problems were simpler. We still thought government could fix things, although the Vietnam War and Watergate had begun to weaken our faith.

Watergate-inspired demands for political ethics dominated almost every campaign in America, nowhere more fiercely than in Los Angeles. Bradley accused his opponent, Mayor Sam Yorty, of being a captive of powerful business interests and their political contributions. The ethical debate centered on two issues, proposed oil drilling in the Pacific Palisades by the Yorty-backed Occidental Petroleum Corp. and uncontrolled development, particularly in the Santa Monica Mountains.

There was a hope that racial tension, which exploded in the 1965 Watts riots, had eased as African-Americans, whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans joined behind Bradley, then a black city councilman. Economically, L.A. was on the move and as I remember, people were optimistic about the future.

What I recall most about that campaign was Bradley’s welcome promise to turn the mayor’s office into a center of municipal activism and leadership.

For liberals, the Bradley campaign offered a renewal of the activist vision promised them by the murdered Robert Kennedy, still mourned by many L.A. Democrats. While the stolid Bradley was no Bob Kennedy, he had an energy and openness that the office had not seen for many years. Those qualities, plus the hope that he offered of racial peace, also attracted many non-liberals.

Yorty had taken refuge in the office’s City Charter-mandated weakness. Muddy-thinking reformers had diluted mayoral power, giving powerful department heads Civil Service protection and forcing the mayor to share a great deal of power with the City Council. Bradley, conceding the Charter limitations, promised that he would nevertheless energize the office.

He said that he would do this by appointing diverse and energetic members to the commissions that set policy for such powerful city departments as Police, Fire, Water and Power, the Airport and Harbor. He would also use his political skill, and his years of experience on the City Council, to form alliances with the lawmakers. And he pledged to use his office as a platform to voice the hopes and needs of the people.

For a while, it worked.

Bradley was a sincere, if not compelling, advocate. He pushed his downtown redevelopment plan through the council. He successfully negotiated with the lawmakers on a number of issues, such as passage of the city rent control ordinance.

But as the years wore on, Bradley dropped out. Reporters used to check with the mayor’s office to find out about his legislative plans. Toward the end, there was no need for such calls.

The commissioners turned out to be as diverse as Bradley’s list of contributors. In fact, that’s where most of them came from.

Occasionally, a commission would do something important or controversial. You could sometimes see signs of life on the Police Commission, the Planning Commission and a couple of others. But usually, the commissioners just ratified decisions made by civil servants running departments.

And, in 1985, he dropped his opposition to Occidental drilling for oil below the Pacific Palisades, a decision later reversed by the voters.

What I learned from the election, and from the long Bradley years that followed, is that power resides in the office for a mayor determined to exert leadership.

For example, the other day, I saw the heads of two departments--community development and housing--each asking a City Council committee for money for their own programs to help the poor.

Bradley should have told them to get together or get out. Even if he can’t fire them, he could make their lives so miserable they’ll quit.

In 1973, Bradley envisioned a path for an effective mayor. As the years passed, his vision dimmed and he lost his way. But the route he laid out remains for the next mayor to follow.