Hahn Gets Lukewarm Union Help

Los Angeles labor unions that poured more than $1.5 million and hundreds of volunteers into an effort to elect Antonio Villaraigosa mayor in 2001 are running a significantly smaller campaign this year on behalf of Mayor James K. Hahn.

Miguel Contreras, secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, said the coalition of 345 locals plans to spend $500,000 to $800,000 in this spring’s city election to urge union members to reelect the mayor. Most of that will be spent in the runoff campaign, which would help Hahn only if he is one of the top two finishers in the March 8 election.

The federation began a phone-banking operation to reach union members last week, and plans to send out a round of mailers before March 8, Contreras said.

“We have an incumbent now who’s better funded than everybody else is,” he said.

Contreras called the 2001 election “a whole different race,” noting that Villaraigosa was low in the polls when the federation backed his candidacy.

“You have to do a lot more work for an unknown,” he said.

Details about the unions’ campaign came on a day when most of the mayoral candidates kept out of sight, busy making television advertisements and raising money before next week’s deadline for campaign finance reports.

But Hahn was very visible, crisscrossing Los Angeles in a series of news conferences that took him from Hollywood, where he dedicated a square for Cuban chanteuse Celia Cruz, to Sun Valley, where he addressed the day’s storm damage with fire officials.

The union federation’s scaled-back operation on the mayor’s behalf reflects a division within labor, which endorsed Villaraigosa over Hahn by one vote four years ago. The federation’s political board handed the mayor its support in December, but Contreras warned at the time that he could not guarantee that the rank-and-file would follow the endorsement.

Although Hahn has the longtime support of many city unions, Villaraigosa, a former teachers union organizer, continues to have the backing of many union members. A poll by The Times earlier this month found that 27% of union members were supporting Villaraigosa, 19% were backing Hahn and 35% were undecided.

“It’s definitely a challenge,” said Javier Gonzalez, political director of the Service Employees International Union’s Local 1877, which represents janitors. “Antonio is extremely popular among our membership. People are familiar with Hahn, but there are a lot of folks who are torn.”

Hahn spokesman Kam Kuwata said he was not familiar with the federation’s efforts on behalf of the mayor because the campaign cannot coordinate with independent efforts. But he noted that even though Villaraigosa enjoyed the backing of the federation in 2001, in households that included a union member Hahn defeated Villaraigosa 52% to 48% in the runoff, according to the exit poll conducted by The Times. “We’re confident that we’re going to do very well with labor,” Kuwata said.

At a restored downtown theater Friday morning, Hahn touted a drop in crime and what he said was growth in the number of local businesses. Both statistics, he said, bolstered his claim that his crime-fighting efforts are helping to improve the economy.

“A safer city means a more business-friendly city,” said the mayor, who has made steep declines in violent crime a centerpiece of his reelection bid.

To illustrate his point, Hahn claimed that nearly 38,000 more businesses sought new business licenses in 2004 than in 2001.

But the mayor’s office acknowledged later that some of the new licenses do not represent new businesses, but rather existing businesses that registered after stepped-up enforcement efforts. Deputy Mayor Renata Simril said she couldn’t say how many licenses fell into that category, although she said she believed it is not many.

The Hahn campaign also released a letter Friday in which he complimented a group advocating small schools, but said its proposal that Los Angeles schools be limited to no more than 500 students was “impractical.”

The group, called the Small Schools Alliance, recently proposed a series of principles for education reform in Los Angeles. The alliance was founded by Steve Barr, who owns a company that operates charter schools, and is backed by former Mayor Richard Riordan, who is now the state education secretary, and several wealthy businessmen.

The alliance has begun an advertising campaign aimed at making school issues a higher-profile part of the election debate. Earlier this week, the group asked candidates to agree to six tenets for improving Los Angeles schools, including the limit on school size.

In his letter, Hahn said he agrees “with the principles” the group advocates, but that it was “impractical for every school to have fewer than 500 students.”

The mayor’s office has no jurisdiction over the Los Angeles Unified School District, which includes all or part of 24 cities in addition to Los Angeles. But polls show that education remains a high priority with voters.

*

Times staff writer Jean Merl contributed to this report.