Tenth in a series
[img]989|left|Denny Zane||no_popup[/img][Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, 63-year-old visionary-philosopher-politician-arch activist in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. This is a first-person account of that journey. Summing up the way he has morphed through a series of (always-linked) career changes, he said: “I got into the habit of making a living by pursuing my personal political priorities.” Now concerned with mass transportation, accent on light rail, his address is movela.com]
Re “When Is 10,000 Not Quite 10,000?”
In 2001, when our coalition sought to win the support of all L.A. mayoralty candidates for regional airports to stave off expansion of LAX, we told them we would deliver pledge cards from 10,000 voters. If the candidates were not right on LAX. Against Mayor Riordan’s expansion strategy, these voters would support someone else.
As it turned out, we didn’t need them after Steve Soboroff became the final candidate to sign the pledge. A good thing. Because we did not have nearly 10,000 signatures.
I believe, though, if we had been forced to, we would have been able to get 10,000 signatures.
It felt sort of like winning a poker hand. You call somebody’s bluff, or they fold, and you don’t have to show your cards. So we didn’t show our cards.
As it turned out, Jimmy Hahn won the election, and for the next four years, we were wrestling with him and his airport appointees. It seemed very clear to us they were going to try to end run the pledge some way. They were cagey about it. They would say “We’re going to incremental this’ and “we will incremental that.” The tried to end-run with talking the right talk, but they did not get very far.
How the Restraint Worked
The SCAG stuff, the financial requirements by the Southern California Assn. of Governments was a big problem for them. They couldn’t put together a financing strategy without federal money.
And they could not go to the feds and get approval for things like “increased passenger fees” without being in the RTD. Our SCAG strategy bottled them up pretty badly.
Our coalition was there when Jimmy Hahn was inaugurated. We showed up with a 12-foot banner. During the next four years, he didn’t outrightly violate the agreement, and we didn’t trust his commitment although Mike Gordon, the Mayor of El Segundo, did. He believed Jimmy would be true and do the right thing, although the members of the LAX board always seemed to be finagling for some advantage.
We had to play pretty serious watchdog to make sure things did not go awry.
Jimmy lost re-election four years later, partly, I believe, because he was a tepid individual. He didn’t inspire confidence that he would really get things done.
But also because there were pay-to-play accusations at the airport that involved members of the board, but I think Leland Wong was the only one ever indicted.
Partly on the basis of those rumors, that had gone around for years, Jimmy lost the confidence of voters.
(To be continued)
