April 29. 2005

Mayor James Hahn  

     Early on Monday morning, April 11, I had a  chance to catch up with Mayor James Hahn  at the Omelette  and Waffle Shop in San Pedro. These days trying to keep up with the Mayor’s extremely busy schedule has become a great feat. When he entered the local eatery he was greeted by a couple of friendly waitresses and then worked the room in casual Hahn style, like he’d just come in from doing the yard work and saw a few friends. He spotted Mike Lansing, LA Unified School District board member, off in the corner doing his homework and stopped to chat up education issues. Then he asked a few of the regulars for their support before we began.
     I started by asking what the three most important things he had accomplished in his first four years, besides paving the streets. He responded that getting the streets paved is very important, but that the “Bridge to Breakwater” promenade, the Vincent Thomas Bridge lighting and the AMP/cold ironing at the China Shipping terminal were the top of his list. I then went on to ask about air pollution.  

JA: One could say that those were the easy things to do. The tough stuff, like no net increase, which was promised to the people of the harbor area, is much more difficult...

MH: It’s hard to get the port to turn that kind of structural thing around because of who their clients are. And the key of it is that everybody’s got to be at the table to get this thing done. I mean a lot of people said it was an impossible goal, as trade is inevitably going to increase with the United States and the rest of the world.…  But I don’t think there is really a choice where I’m at. I live here, my family lives here, this is the air that I breathe everyday, and so does everybody else. I think that we recognize that the port is a huge economic engine for Southern California but it’s also located in a place where a lot of people live and the players obviously are the railroads their locomotives, the trucking industry.. and the steamship companies.  

JA: Some people think they’re going to build a port in Baja.  And you know what, if the port expands the way they project then having a million TEUs in Baja is only going to be a release valve for what’s going on in LA.

MH: Here’s an idea.  I remember when Frank Sanchez was public commissioner under Mayor Riordan. We started talking about that idea. He was very enamored about that idea looking at LA and Long Beach as the Singapore of the city,  and Singapore has a number of satellite ports that aided a part of the whole Singapore situation... A port in  Baja is not something that scares me at all. People who are fearful in ... Port Hueneme right now has a lot of automobile ships coming in there,  a lot of those ships Baja might handle. I’m not fearful about those things I think when anybody looks at the situation they realize that trade will continue to grow. I remember the 2020 plan ... if you look back at that document we’ve already gotten to those TEUs people were expecting by 2020, we are already there in 2005. The port has grown faster than people thought it was going to grow. A lot faster.  

JA: If the port in Baja is built, wouldn’t it be appropriate not to just export the trade, but to export our labor practices as well. In my mind, if corporations can cross the border shouldn’t the ILWU be able to go down to Baja and organize?

MH: Absolutely. They call this an international union, and I’d like to see them to be able to be international. And I think that we saw this with the maquilladores... and the companies are just moving across the border for cheaper wages and no benefits, that’s not good for the world. That’s not good for America I believe. And I think we need to insist that if there’s going to be a port that’s a partner with us we need  to put pressure on their working practices and environmental practices.  
     We talked for some time about the externalized costs of the shipping industry in the ports and how many of the environmental mitigation and transportation infrastructure costs were borne by the public and not paid by industry. Mayor Hahn went on to say . . .

MH: We looked at that with the ACTA or Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority a couple weeks ago.  The idea to move the EIR to the 710 plan is $5 billion dollars and nobody has any clues as to where the money is coming from.  

JA: Alan Lowenthal wants to put a per container fee on each TEU.

MH: So does Dana Rorabacher, he wants to use that fee for Homeland Security a lot of people are looking at the industry paying its own way I think that’s the right way to go.  

JA: And how do you get them to the table to do that?

MH: It’s gonna be the challenge. The key is for them to understand there is no other source in funding to get these things done. The state budget deficit, the federal budget deficit, we have huge infrastructure deficits that also have to be met and there is no income to pay for that. On the 710 Freeway we have $5 billion reasons...let’s begin the hard process of this, how are we going to get the money for this? This is my objection to my opponent on these grandiose transportation plans. Yeah it’d be great—let’s have subways go everywhere in LA county. The only thing is how are we going to pay for them. I’ve asked him that question in debates and all he comes back with is “dissing” my 25 worst intersection plan. He won’t answer the question of how he pays for a subway that comes close to $300 million a mile, where does the money come from? I’m going to level with you, we are going to need an income stream.  

JA: It’s not going to come from lowering the gas tax?

MH: No, now isn’t that weird. I can’t figure out what that is other than it reminds people of the shell game. No pun intended because there’s Shell Oil. But, if we lowered the gas tax, which we know has to be dedicated to one thing, which is roads, motorists get the gas tax. There are a lot of restrictions on the gas tax...well, I’m going to lower that and raise the sales tax; well, the sales tax is the fun thing for the legislature because they can do anything they want with it and we say, even when the voters said with Prop. 42, we want the sales on our gasoline to go for roads, they suspended it every year saying, “oh, we need the money more to solve our budget problems.” None of our transportation dollars are being spent. Transportation dollars that we all recognize we need whether it’s for the 710 freeway, whether it’s the Alameda Corridor East, whether it’s the intersection improvements on the freeway that we’re all trying to get done. Those dollars, $1.3 billion in Prop. 42 money, could have been going into LA County over the last three years.  

JA: and…it’s all up in Sacramento.

MH: They get to keep it. It’s not even a loan. They don’t even have to pay it back ...the governor says I think this is terrible, but I’m going to do the same thing that the previous governor did.  

JA: About the Schwarzenegger, obviously on some level you got to get along with this guy. But frankly he’s dissed just about every constituency that you have. How can you be the leader of Los Angeles and not get in this guy’s face about taking back pensions, not giving $2 billion to schools.

MH: Well, I think he’s finding out that some of these ideas aren’t popular. I was glad to work with him on Proposition 1A where we were able to stop Sacramento from raiding local property tax dollars for their budget mess, so I appreciate his help on that, because he had to break a campaign promise on that James, that he could get the budget done by June 30. He was willing to break that campaign promise. and hold up the entire goal of having a budget on time, so that he could take care of what’s left. So I appreciate that. I didn’t agree with him taking money way from education. He heard loudly and clearly from the police officers and firefighters in this state, and that’s why he backed away from this idea  

JA: And his poll numbers are dropping faster than a lead weight.

MH:  But you know what’s interesting is that he is willing to change his stance. He’s done this a couple of times. I remember when he proposed right after he became governor shortening the amount of time that animals would be kept in animal shelters before they could be euthanized. I howled and protested , and sent a whole bunch of letters saying absolutely not, and he reversed on that. I think he’s somebody who needs to listen to more people before he makes any policy decision.  

JA: ...but who is he listening to?

MH: I think he listened to the cops and the firefighters on this one.  

JA: He’s listening to people like Milton Friedman and that guy that used to work for Ronald Reagan about how to reorganize the economy of this state and he fundamentally has a different philosophy of government than you do.

MH: No, he’s coming up from a different standpoint.  

JA: He thinks if we have a free market economy then everybody’s going to be free... now I don’t think there’s a lot of people in the city of Los Angeles who really understand who that short little guy is in Chicago.

MH: This Governor is going to find out that if he’s going to be elected from the center, which he was, then he needs to govern for the center too. And I think he’s starting to get that’s who elected him. He wasn’t going to be partisan. I think that was what people really felt about Arnold Schwarzenegger, which  maybe he did not pass this partisan test and I think ... in order for him to be successful,  he’s got to govern from the center. 
     They don’t always like me. In this instance of working with Arnold on this state budget problem I was looking out for my folks and so were a lot of mayors, so I was proud to lead the effort on the part of California mayors to take on the legislature, which was controlled by Democrats. Those guys didn’t like me doing it. My good friend  John Burton, whom I’ve known for a long time,  didn’t like me saying we want our money back. Fabio Nuñez, the speaker and a good friend of mine we work together to keep the city together. He didn’t like the fact that I went up there and said “I want my money back.” So I’m willing to buck the political establishment when it comes to the interests of my constituents.  Janice and I, we learned this from my dad. We’re kind of maverick Democrats. We don’t hew to the party line all the time. I think my dad was one of the great Democratic local elected officials but he certainly was never a darling of the Democratic political establishment.

JA: Why is it that your administration is getting hammered for some kind of advertising consultants and Dick Riordan was never hammered for these consultants?

MH:  I don’t know. It’s a different time period. He spent so much money on consultants when he was Mayor, it was amazing. And in his own office... I never had this. He spent $7 million dollars on PR contracts just in the mayor’s office. Every department had a PR contract. He thought consultants were the way to solve everything. I think if you are paying consultants a million dollars a month then you better get something pretty dramatic for that.  

JA:  Still the overarching issue of why your administration has been criticized for these sorts of things and Riordan did not, part of the problem is a criticism I can also lay at the feet of your sister. It is that she has a very hard time of firing people who aren’t doing their job. Is this something you got from your dad?

MH:  I don’t think we had a lot of people who weren’t.  

JA: You had a lot of holdovers. You had Ted Stein, Leland Wong. Frankly, if I was the Mayor and I knew they were Dick Riordan guys I would have cut them loose from the beginning.

MH: The cases of Commissioner Wong as you may know…I asked him to resign. The next thing I know he’s hosting a fundraiser for Antonio Villaraigosa.  

JA: Wel,l that’s how deep his commitment is. But the real issue becomes the kind of thing where say…the philosophy of trying to rule from the middle. You’ve got to keep people on both sides of the aisle working with you and yet you know that some of those people are about as committed to you as long as you are in the mayor’s office.

MH: I think the commitment was there, and I don’t know that I agree with you necessarily on that, but here’s my problem: I don’t want a different standard to be applied to me than has been applied to previous mayors, but clearly some standards have been invented that all we have to do is say there is an allegation, and suddenly that results in a conviction. … I’d rather talk about the facts. Here’s a fact: crime is down in the city. Here’s a fact:we’ve doubled housing production. Here’s a fact: we’ve got 85 neighbor councils certified. Those are facts, and unfortunately, I’m in a campaign where the other side gets to say “he’s the most investigated man.” Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not. But an investigation is not a conclusion.

Random Lengths Publisher James Allen and Mayor James Hahn take an in-depth look at the issues during an interview at the Omelette and Waffle Shop in San Pedro. Photo:  Bernard Kane.