Report Card

So Mayor Richard Riordan gets high marks for making our city safer and our government more efficient, including eliminating a huge deficit in the budget and putting our city on a solid fiscal foundation (“The Mayor’s Midterm Exam,” by Jean Merl, June 11).

But he gets low marks for not making everyone happy (if that is even possible). Show me a politician who makes everyone happy and I’ll show you someone who isn’t doing their job of tackling the big issues.

As for his boardroom style, there isn’t a fairer or more competent man in this city. I, along with the majority of our citizens, put him there because we wanted one last chance to rid ourselves of the failed policies of his inept predecessors cians and to help this city to realize its great potential.

The best is yet to come. Let’s get out Riordan’s way and allow him to create what we need: a safer city with a strong economic base. When jobs, education and good neighborhoods prevail once again, all fair-minded people will benefit.

Ron Salisbury

Los Angeles

*

Consistent with his corporate background, Richard Riordan has subordinated long-term problems to short-run politics and economics. We have suffered what at the time was the most costly urban earthquake in history and learned that we can protect capital only through risk-avoidance and loss-minimization. That means major retrofitting of structures--particularly of houses, apartments and condominiums with known seismic deficiencies--and seismic zoning. When some long-held recognition of this problem surfaced in City Council after the quake, Riordan provided no leadership.

Los Angeles is badly congested and has the worst air-pollution problem in the country. Riordan has failed to recognize a common solution to both problems--more use of public transportation. He has nudged MTA resources away from two systems that have gotten some people, and kept others, out of automobiles: the bus system and Metrolink long-distance commuter rail. Instead, support was provided for projects like the Blue line to Pasadena that maximize the value of locally awarded contracts but do little about the transportation problem itself.

And finally, our city has had to endure the worst urban riots in American history, highlighting another problem that seems not to have made the mayor’s agenda.

Bob Clark Jr.

Los Angeles

*

Merl’s midterm report card on Mayor Riordan mentions the accomplishments: Crime is down, the police are receiving more funding and the government is running more efficiently. Then comes a broad and somewhat vague charge that his style has alienated blacks. I don’t know which is more predictable--that a white mayor would be criticized in such a manner or that The Times would give that degree of visibility to an innocuous accusation.

William S. LaSor Jr.

Trabuco Canyon

*

Merle explains how this rich, successful businessman, who is turning Los Angeles into L.A. Inc., is going to channel $430 million in federal grant and loan guarantees through a Community Development Bank to boost the economies of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Unfortunately, now is a time when Republicans in Congress are attempting to portray funding for the arts as frivolous and wasteful.

This conjures up images of inner-city streets lined with suburban-type franchises such as bookstores, fast-food chains and bowling alleys instead of accessible modern libraries, health and nutrition centers and gathering places for creative self-expression.

Let’s be aware that the term “boost the economy” means one thing to a multimillionaire juggling money at the top and another to an inner-city resident struggling without money at the bottom.

K. B. Worden

Lancaster