Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on His First 6 Months

http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/tcrmag/2014/02/2014-02-07b-tcrmag.mp3

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti took office last summer and wasted no time setting a different tone from the man he replaced, Antonio Villaraigosa. The former city councilman is L.A.'s first Jewish mayor -- but he's also half Latino and fluent in Spanish. The former Rhodes scholar can dance salsa, plays jazz piano and is a bit of a computer geek who designed a mobile app to improve city services. We sit down with Mayor Garcetti in his office to talk about his efforts to make local government more efficient.

ERIC GARCETTI: The city and the city government in general are a few decades behind in terms of technology, in terms of management culture and leadership development. We have some superstars and some great success stories. Look at the Los Angeles Police Department. We're now the safest big city in America in terms of violent crime per capita, unthinkable 10, 15 years ago. So, I've brought kind of a different management approach. I re-interviewed all of our general managers. I didn't just tell them you're going to have the job no matter what, made some changes, and I'm really looking at people setting numerical goals that we can measure. The people can hold me accountable, I can hold my managers accountable, and if we can make customer service and technology hallmarks of what a modern city government looks like, I think it can inspire not only Los Angeles, but the nation about how a city can be run.

SCOTT SHAFER: As you know, your fellow mayor in San Jose, Chuck Reed, is promoting a ballot measure that would give cities and local governments more flexibility in changing pension and retirement health benefits and so on. Do you support that measure or that approach, at least?

GARCETTI: Well, I understand why Chuck would do that and I think a lot of cities have felt hamstrung. Really the combination of management and labor together have too often put their head in the sand and pretended there wasn't a problem. We took a different approach here and we've been very successful, which is to actually sit down and negotiate and to face the music. We made the biggest change in pension reform in the country of any big city, going from 2 to 6 percent of people’s salaries for their benefits to up to 11 percent. For our sworn personnel, fire and police, we put something on the ballot, successfully passed that without their opposition. So, I think when you can engage unions to do that. … At the Department of Water and Power, we just had a historic contract that I helped negotiate that established a much more sustainable brand-new pension tier. That’s probably a better approach because the lawsuits aren't just from unions. But individuals can sue when you make these changes and you can get caught in the courts for a long time. So, I think it’s really important for leaders to just tell the truth, to be blunt, and to demand that everybody come to the table -- but at the end of the day, do that together.

SHAFER: Speaking of truth, just a few weeks ago the Los Angeles 20/20 Commission released a report called “A Time for Truth.” It was chaired, as you know, by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Cantor, and it was very pessimistic. It found a city in decline, mired in poverty, failing schools, a long list of problems. What's your reaction to that report and its characterization of Los Angeles?

GARCETTI: Well, I appreciate some of the criticisms. They are similar to some of things I've been saying that we need to fix. I respectfully tend to lead with my optimism, rather than my pessimism, and I think the proof is in the numbers. We had more people visit Los Angeles than ever before last year as tourists. We have more people that live here than ever before in our history. We have more students studying here than ever before in three top-25 universities, the only city in the nation to have that. So, when you look at the proof, this is clearly not a city in decline. But we have real problems that we have to face. We have to continue a path of fiscal sustainability with pension reform and, looking at our salaries and benefits, we have to make sure that we bridge the poverty gap that exists in too many neighborhoods, which is a strong priority of mine. I agree with the report about what we have to fix. I look forward to the second report, which will give us some suggestions more than just the diagnosis.

SHAFER: I wonder what you make of San Francisco. The two cities have historically had this rivalry, although I think the rivalry kind of goes one direction from north to south in a way, but we've got a situation in San Francisco now where there are protests over all of the influx of high-tech, high-paying jobs, and Google buses taking people to their jobs down in Silicon Valley, and the increase in rents, that people making a lot of money seem to be having that impact on the rental market. What do you make of a city that seems to be up in arms over so many high-paying jobs?

GARCETTI: Well, I love San Francisco and the Bay Area has done a great job, not just at the high end, but even at the low end, of having a higher wage in general than down here. But I think it highlights how important as we develop and redevelop, that you have to always balance the good that comes with that forward movement and here in Los Angeles we were just designated by President Obama as one of the first three cities to have a "promise zone," which is really looking at how we layer all of the services from public transportation to education to public safety to health, to really try to break the back of poverty and give young people an opportunity to be the next entrepreneur.

SHAFER: You live in one of the most diverse cities on the planet -- I think there’s 200 languages spoken in Los Angeles, large numbers of Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, Latin Americans, Jews, Iranians, you can go on and on and you yourself are a mixture of more than one group, part Latino, half Jewish. What do you see as the role, if any, for identity politics, which used to be so big in a lot of major cities?

GARCETTI: Identity politics here kind of exploded in the sense that people aren't one thing anymore. Even if they’re ethnically from one background, we are all kind of hybrids, and that’s important for global competitiveness. Whether it’s looking at the way that culture informs the global trade that we have here, so that everybody thinks of Los Angeles as their second home anywhere in the world, or in those cases where we’re the largest population outside the home country for 37 different countries. It’s probably not just the most diverse city in the United States or the world, but ever in human history, and I think when we look at where the economy is going globally you need to have that sort of cultural literacy, that hybrid comfort of being able to navigate borders. And L.A. is probably best poised to win that competitive fight in the future because of who we are.

SHAFER: Finally, you are six months into your first term. How will you measure success in 3½ years?

GARCETTI: We are bringing a culture of metrics and measurements to city government unlike any that I’ve ever seen before. We’re going to be very clear, what’s the crime rate, what’s the employment rate, how are we doing with our deficit and our budget, in the City of Los Angeles. But I think in the broadest terms: Have we brought our confidence back in Los Angeles? Are we building a great infrastructure and taking the capital of cars and moving into a great public transit infrastructure? Have we reinvested in our city and we believe in ourselves? That will be the measure of success.

SHAFER: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, thank you so much for talking to us.

GARCETTI: Great being with you. Thanks so much.