County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas was soaring this morning, which is exactly how an overflow turnout expected to be greeted at the California Science Center when they arrived for a classy tutorial on how to — hopefully — increase federal funding for Los Angeles transit projects.
Two of the Supervisor’s most prominent talents are energizing and mobilizing.
They provided the ideal twin points of ignition for a conclave of activists who were imbibing a subject — obtaining federal funding — as dense and esoteric as the ground beneath Mulholland Drive.
Officially, bureaucratically, the program was known as “New Ideas for New Starts: Equity Considerations and Federal Transit Funding.”
Approaching the end of his second year on the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Ridley-Thomas has lasered in on mass transportation as a primary focus of his office for at least three reasons:
• Los Angeles is the home of the most congested county in America.
• Los Angeles, critics and friends both frequently say, has the worst mass transportation system since San Francisco in the 1820s following 14 consecutive days of torrential rains.
• Reason No. 2 neatly dovetails into Reason No. 3: Los Angeles has been utterly anemic about acquiring funding from Washington to help underwrite all manner of transportation projects.
Perhaps this can be laid to a lack of city political leadership as well as a paucity of inspiration or motivation from the MTA.
One of the earliest headlines at the all-morning Ridley-Thomas conference was that a 35-year-old Washington program known as New Starts doles out a hefty $2 billion every year to cities around the country that lobby the most impressive pitches for funding aid.
Obtaining funding, it was emphasized and repeated, is a heavily circuitous process, or as Mr. Ridley-Thomas said:
“For every dollar you are seeking, there is $10 worth of applications.”
Patience, luck, intimate knowledge of the cloud-covered system, and world-class persistence all will be needed to bring Los Angeles from the rear of the handout line to close at least to the front, the Supervisor said.
Among the speakers were state Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), U.S. Rep. Judy Chu (D-East Los Angeles) on the first anniversary of her election to Congress, and one of Santa Monica’s most effective activists, Denny Zane of Move L.A.
They were crisp and clear in urging the audience to get behind a much more concentrated effort to win far greater funding for Los Angeles.
But the show-stealer was the arouser-in-chief, Mr. Ridley-Thomas. He could stir up dust at Hillside Memorial Park at midnight.
In prepping the crowd, the master rhetorician took words that would have looked uninspiring on paper and pumped them with energy that volleyed toward the sky.
“This is an exciting time in the region known as Los Angeles,” he said, slowly and meticulously for dramatic effect, massaging as he articulated, extracting all of the air from each syllable, allowing his emphasized words to gently waft across the crowded square room.
The more Mr. Ridley-Thomas grows into the Supervisor’s all-day, every-day role, the more peerless he seems when it comes to launching and inspiring an audience.
One of his favorite gestures is seizing the preacher role, to practically shout a phrase dripping with mundanity, and then asking the audience to say it back to him, with supra-humane zest.
Like training a cheering squad.
Unlike his audience at City Hall a couple of weeks ago — 75 college-age interns — this morning’s crowd was filled with adults well settled into their lives and careers.
In their workaday lives, they are not given to shouting from one end of Exposition Park to the other. But at Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s urging, they did.
Again.
And again.
He was a bulldog who was not going to let go, and the crowd didn’t, either.
Once aroused to their peak, now the master of ceremonies, with the accent on the first word, was ready to lead them into a three-hour tutorial about transit funding that just sailed along, as if propelled by very favorable human winds.
