Riordan Joins Mayor’s Race, Vows More Police

Richard Riordan, one of the city’s wealthiest and most influential private citizens, announced Wednesday that he will be a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, running on a platform that stresses his skills as a businessman “with a heart” while calling for tougher law enforcement and a government friendlier to business.

“As mayor I will get tough on crime, drug dealing, gangs and violence,” Riordan said at a news conference at a Studio City restaurant. “I will replace rhetoric with substance, fear with security, fiscal incompetence with managerial accountability, polarization with cooperation and alienation with pride.”

Riordan, 62, said he felt driven to run for mayor because city government has proven itself incapable of lifting Los Angeles out of crisis.

“I am compelled to do so because today Los Angeles faces the greatest leadership void in its 200-year history,” Riordan said. “Everywhere I go I sense a pervasive feeling of alienation. Alienation among citizens because they no longer feel their city is safe. Alienation among job-seekers because they see a government that is hostile to business. Alienation among parents because they no longer think their city government can protect or educate their children.”

On the issue of law enforcement, Riordan made the most ambitious commitment of any mayoral candidate by pledging to increase the size of the Police Department by 3,000 officers over four years. He said he would pay for the increase through a sweeping program of government cost-cutting and reorganization.

He said he would slash mayoral and City Council budgets by $4.4 million, save $40 million by turning citywide trash collection over to a private firm, net $700 million a year by entering into a 30-year leasing agreement with a private company to run Los Angeles International Airport, tap $25 million in Community Redevelopment Agency funds and save $6 million a year by abolishing the Board of Public Works and merging its functions with the Bureau of Engineering.

Many of those ideas, such as privatizing trash collection and doing away with the Board of Public Works, are not new, and under Riordan they could face strong opposition from unions and others reluctant to deprive workers of city jobs during a recession.

In the widening field of mayoral hopefuls, with at least 19 names expected to appear on the April ballot, Riordan joins Nick Patsaouras in the category of entrepreneur and civic activist. Yet, in many ways, Riordan is in a class of his own.

Worth an estimated $100 million, Riordan put the crowning touches on his wealth as a venture capitalist and a leveraged buyout specialist who was linked with junk-bond impresario Michael Milken in several deals during the 1980s. A man who has played golf with Ronald Reagan, donated a helicopter to the Catholic archdiocese and acted as confidant to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and Mayor Tom Bradley, Riordan cannot avoid an image of elitism that has the power both to attract and repel the ordinary voter.

Riordan’s success as a political candidate may hinge on his ability to focus attention on the millions of dollars he has given away, the time he has spent working to improve inner-city parks and schools and the executive skills that made him rich and influential.

“Anybody who knows my record knows that I have spent the past 20 years reaching out to every part of the city. I have put computer labs to teach reading and writing in over 350 schools in the Los Angeles area. I have worked to reopen the East L.A. Boys and Girls Club. . . . I have a mentoring program with inner-city students at UCLA.

“The way I differ from all of the candidates is that I have spent my whole life implementing programs and not just rhetoric,” he said.

Over the years, Riordan through his own foundation has contributed $2 million to set up computer labs in schools across the country. As a Bradley appointee to the city’s Coliseum Commission he was involved in the effort to keep the Raiders in Los Angeles, and he played a key role in the county Transportation Commission’s negotiations with the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads to purchase hundreds of miles of right of way for use as commuter rail lines.

Asked if the image of a wealthy businessman would hurt his election chances, Riordan said the talents that made him a successful entrepreneur were those needed to revive the city’s ailing economy.

“I’ve been a venture capitalist for over 30 years. I put seed money in to start over 30 companies . . . I think through that I have created tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue for the city.

“I want to run it (the city) like a business, but a business with a heart.”

Riordan was also asked to compare himself with another businessman-turned-politician, Ross Perot.

“As far as being a businessman there is some comparison. But I think we are very different in our leadership styles. I think I am what I call a collaborative leader,” Riordan said. “I like to bring other people into solutions, to share power and credit and make things happen, where I think Mr. Perot tends to be more of a dictatorial leader.”

Although he has never held elective office, Riordan is no stranger to politics. And while he has become a harsh critic of city government, he has been a staunch supporter of Bradley over the past decade, contributing $134,000 to Bradley’s mayoral campaigns.

Besides the contributions to Bradley, Riordan made a $300,000 loan to the mayor’s unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1986. The same year, Riordan headed a committee and contributed $15,000 to the successful campaign to unseat former state Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird. During the past three years, Riordan’s law firm has received nearly $2 million in contracts with Los Angeles County for legal work related to land development and right-of-way negotiations.

In his speeches, however, Riordan has worked hard to hold himself apart from conventional politics and politicians, insisting that for all his wealth and privilege--he is a graduate of Princeton University--he best represents the average voter’s frustration with government.

He has sought to promote a populist image in various ways. He garaged his expensive Japanese car and started driving a Ford Explorer.

A Westside resident who works in a downtown office, Riordan made his debut as a mayoral candidate at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, a distinctly middlebrow San Fernando Valley establishment, and made clear his hopes of appealing to a part of the city that has often felt left out of municipal largess and that is home to half of the city’s voters.

“The Valley has been disenfranchised by the city for years,” Riordan said. “If we want to solve the problems of the inner city we have to keep the Valley part of the equation.”

Riordan also has been campaigning hard in South-Central Los Angeles. He said Wednesday that he resigned in August from the Los Angeles Country Club because it did not have any black members.

Riordan has also sought to appeal to the frustration of average voters by championing a term-limits initiative that would restrict city officeholders to two consecutive terms.

He said Wednesday that his signature drive to qualify the initiative for the April ballot is on target and that he expects to have the required 208,000 signatures by the Dec. 20 deadline.

Riordan said he has spent $200,000 of his own money on the term-limits campaign. He also said that he has raised about $500,000 for his mayoral campaign, most of it coming in the form of $1,000-per-person tickets to a downtown dinner planned for tonight.

Riordan said he would not accept public campaign funds, which are available to city candidates who agree to a spending cap and other requirements.

“I do not intend to take any public money,” he said. “At a time when our services are being cut, when we don’t have enough police officers, I don’t think it’s right for anyone to accept money from the government for this campaign.”

But if Riordan ends up spending more than $2 million on the primary campaign--which he said he is prepared to do--he would not qualify for public funds anyway.

Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this story.

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