The truth about mayoral power in L.A.

Good morning, it’s Monday, September 21 and you can expect downright balmy weather in the mid 70s. 

Years ago, when I started as a beat reporter in the L.A. Times’ City Hall bureau, I spent a good portion of my free time reading my way through the paper’s City Hall archives. 

I had already covered Los Angeles local government on and off as a general assignment reporter for half a decade, but I was obsessed then by how much I didn’t know.

L.A. City Hall is a place where the publicly available facts seldom reveal what the hell is actually going on, and where what you see unfolding in various meetings and committees is only the tip of the iceberg. The real drama is below the waterline, often dictated by decisions, alliances and enmity forged years earlier. 

So I went spelunking through the archives, usually while eating my lunch on the 27th-story observation deck. The goal was to learn the history, but also to understand  (and maybe steal from) how my predecessors had done the job. Digging through the decades, I found myself particularly captivated by the work of Jim Newton — a journalist who had long since left the paper, but who’d covered the LAPD and Richard Riordan’s mayoral administration in the 1990s. Jim had a knack for reporting the news while boiling down the essence of things and unearthing the subterranean forces at play. 

I was thrilled when Jim — an esteemed journalist and author who  founded and edits Blueprint, a UCLA-based public affairs magazine — agreed to write about the mayoral race for us. His piece is about the election, but in typical Jim Newton fashion, it’s really about how L.A. works — or doesn’t.