Jones Attacks Riordan’s Stand on Education

Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bill Jones came to the home turf of the front-runner in the GOP primary Monday, hopping on a rickety school bus in Woodland Hills to bash the education record of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.

After touting his own school reform plan, Jones criticized Riordan for opposing the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District and for backing a new school board and superintendent who are trying to finish the uncompleted Belmont Learning Complex.

“Dick Riordan’s hand-picked superintendent and his hand-picked school board members haven’t made a dent in the bureaucratic nightmare of LAUSD,” Jones said outside Reseda High School.

Riordan, who has made a point of literally laughing off Jones’ jabs for months, responded sharply at a campaign stop of his own in Chinatown.

“I’m sick and tired of answering the folklore and the lies of people in this campaign,” Riordan said. “I think people want to hear about education.”

Riordan has already faced an onslaught of negative ads from the man he is trying to unseat, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.

At the state Republican convention last weekend, both Jones and the third GOP candidate in the race, Pacific Palisades businessman Bill Simon, lit into Riordan.

Simon is preparing his own series of television spots lambasting Riordan and has contributed $1.4 million more to his own campaign this past week.

Simon and Jones have lagged behind Riordan in raising campaign cash. Simon, a multimillionaire, has stayed competitive largely by lending money to his operation.

With Simon in New York at a fund-raiser, Monday was a contrast between the underfunded and underdog campaign of Secretary of State Jones and Riordan, also a multimillionaire.

Riordan last month cruised through California in a huge black bus with a black leather sofa, granite tile floor, mirrored ceiling, DVD player, VCR and microwave oven--previously used to ferry pop singer Chaka Khan and basketball star Dennis Rodman.

Jones’ standard-issue yellow school bus was nearly 90 minutes late pulling into the parking lot of the Promenade Mall in Woodland Hills to pick up the secretary of state and his entourage. One reporter rode along with the candidate, his wife, three campaign staffers, one supporter from Thousand Oaks and seven UCLA students who are in the same fraternity as Jones’ nephew.

When he wasn’t criticizing Riordan’s record on education, Jones pushed his own school reform proposal, which calls for limiting school districts to 30,000 students, slimming the state education bureaucracy and allowing schools to control their curriculum, construction and budget.

Although Jones calls for less meddling from Sacramento, some of his proposals could interfere with local control of schools. To hold districts to 30,000 students would require splitting L.A. Unified into 24 new districts and overturning a decision by Carson voters last year to stay with the mammoth district rather than create their own.

Jones said he could be flexible on the size of districts but that parents and teachers would agree that smaller means better. “Our basic premise here is to get the money and the authority to the school site,” he said.

The bus stopped outside Reseda High, where Jones criticized Riordan for opposing the breakup of the L.A. district after promising to back it in his first campaign for mayor in 1993. Jones said the San Fernando Valley, a hotbed of the school breakup movement, has suffered because of Riordan.

“Dick has said his goal as governor would be to ‘empower’ people,” Jones said. “Did Dick empower the people of this valley as mayor? No.”

Jones later stopped at the $123-million Belmont Learning Complex, where construction was halted in 1999 because of fears of methane gas contamination.

Although the mayor of Los Angeles has no power over the school district, Jones contended that Riordan is responsible for the district’s current push to finish the school.

“It would seem to me that if they’re so focused on getting something built, they should do it somewhere they know is safe,” he said.

School district officials have said they will open Belmont only if it can be made safe.

Riordan said Monday that the school board and Supt. Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor recruited by the former mayor, had “turned that district around.”

“Belmont, I predict, will be open because of the leadership of these people,” he said.

On his visit to the Wing Hop Ginseng & Chinese Products store in Chinatown, Riordan appeared with a group of Asian American supporters.

To mark the eve of the Chinese New Year, he handed out small red envelopes to merchants and customers. Under ancient Chinese custom, the envelopes would contain cash; Riordan’s were stuffed with chocolate money.

Riordan used the occasion to renew his attacks on the governor’s fiscal management.

“I hope Gray Davis considers a tradition of the Chinese New Year, and that is that you’re to pay all your debts before the end of the year,” Riordan said. “But Gray Davis has another idea. He’s going to make future generations pay the debts for his mistakes.”

Riordan has declined to say how he would close a state budget gap of more than $10 billion, but he reiterated his support for consolidating some state agencies.

“Now is the time to start the cutbacks,” he said. “Make every cutback you can, starting today. Get rid of redundant departments.”

Roger Salazar, a Davis spokesman, said the governor has an excellent record on the budget. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Salazar said of Riordan.

Davis, who attended a Chinese New Year celebration Monday in San Francisco’s Chinatown, released two new television commercials for his reelection campaign.

One promotes his expansion of a program that provides health insurance to children whose families can’t afford it. The other casts him as tough on crime--a supporter of gun control and the death penalty with a slew of endorsements from law enforcement.

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Times staff writer Nancy Vogel contributed to this report.