Woo, Riordan Differ on Healing L.A.’s Economy : Politics: Although not intended as a debate, the appearance by mayoral candidate and a likely contender offers contrasting views on solving city’s problems.

City Councilman Michael Woo and lawyer-businessman Richard Riordan, who may well represent the ideological poles of the Los Angeles mayor’s race, offered markedly different prescriptions Tuesday for healing the city’s ailing economy.

Though not planned as a campaign debate, the event was the first time two people expected to be major contenders in the mayor’s race have squared off before the same audience.

Speaking at the Hyatt Regency, Woo, a liberal who believes that government can intervene effectively in the local economy, stressed the need for the city to back loans to minority businesses, to help find jobs for high school students and to create an “urban peace corps” to harness the idealism of college-age youth.

Riordan, a fiscal conservative and longtime critic of government red tape, contended that the economy will not revive until the city is a safer and more hospitable place to do business. Crime must be reduced and City Hall’s hostility to business must end, Riordan said.

During the forum, sponsored by the Los Angeles Headquarters Assn. and attended largely by lawyers and business executives, the two men agreed that the City Hall bureaucracy must be streamlined to make it easier for businesses to obtain permits to operate or expand in Los Angeles. But Riordan took the argument a step further, saying that regulations governing business must be reduced.

Elected to the City Council in 1985, Woo, 40, was educated as an urban planner, has never worked outside government and became the first candidate to officially enter the mayor’s race when he announced his candidacy in September.

Riordan, 62, is expected to make his formal announcement today. Inviting comparisons with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, Riordan is a former investment banker who amassed a fortune of about $100 million, much of it through leveraged buyouts. A philanthropist and civic activist, Riordan has been an influential appointee to city commissions, a confidante of Mayor Tom Bradley and former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, and a lawyer for the County of Los Angeles.

Despite their extensive experience working in or with local government, Woo and Riordan are running as reformers who say they will make sweeping changes in government.

“L.A. needs the leadership of someone with a solid background creating jobs and economic opportunity and forging public and private partnerships,” Riordan said.

Woo said: “I am running for mayor because I don’t want to see our city continue to go down the drain.”

For Riordan, the process of economic reform would begin by attacking the city’s image as a dangerous place to visit.

“The lack of safety is costing us over 31,000 tourist jobs over the next year,” he said. “We have a city that has homeless roaming it and that gives the perception to tourists and visiting business people that it is not clean and that is dangerous. If we want to restore the future of L.A. on a positive note we have make the city safe. It is a sine qua non of everything else.”

On the subject of the city’s attitude toward private enterprise, Riordan said that Los Angeles for the last 10 years has become “increasingly the enemy of business. Business people are not the customers of this city. They are the enemies of this city.”

He cited an example of a San Fernando Valley-based manufacturer of baseball bats that decided to move to Utah after learning that it would take three to four years for the city to approve the firm’s request to expand operations in Los Angeles.

“If you wanted to put a tree outside this hotel in downtown L.A., you would need eight different permits,” Riordan said. “That’s right, eight. . . . It’s a crazy, crazy crazy system.”

Woo saw the problem in different terms.

“The bottom-line problem is the economy, that is dealing with the basic issues such as who owns the businesses, who has the jobs, who can qualify for loans and where is the money going in the community. Unless City Hall is ready to face up to those basic economic issues then I think we are just begging for a recurrence of the same kind of violence that tore our city apart six months ago.

Woo called for the creation of a community development bank to help “people who live in neighborhoods such as South-Central Los Angeles or Pacoima or East Los Angeles to get the financing they need so (they) . . . can afford to start businesses within those neighborhoods. The goal here is to enable people in minority neighborhoods to feel they have direct economic stake in the future of their community.”

And he proposed that the city back private loans to marginal inner-city entrepreneurs with a guarantee fund made up of $10 million in revenue derived from community development block grant funds or from bond sales.

“The money could be used to guarantee loans to potential business owners who barely fail to qualify for loans but who otherwise would be responsible business owners. If the city were to invest $10 million, that potentially could generate $200 million in loans,” he said.

Woo and Riordan called for establishing a one-stop permitting center, something Woo called a “Nordstrom department store of economic development” to steer businesses seeking to locate or expand in the city quickly through the permitting process.

Riordan said that step should be just the first one in reforming business regulations in Los Angeles.

“Ultimately we want to reduce the regulations in this city,” he said. “This will take a long while. Day by day, month by month, year by year over the past 10 years the number of rules and regulations in this city kept growing and growing and growing. Somebody is going to have to step back and say enough and start over.”