HOWARD FINE

Staff Reporter

At one point during last week’s heated L.A. City Council debate on tax reform, Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg turned to the business leaders in the audience and said: “You folks have made your case. Business tax relief is needed. I agree with you. But why give some businesses a tax decrease and others a tax increase? Why not give every single business a tax cut?”

Usually, such remarks would draw cheers from business leaders.

Not so with Goldberg.

Carol Schatz, president of the Central City Association, sighed in frustration. Ezunial Burts, the normally jovial chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, gave Goldberg a cold stare.

In the eyes of these business leaders, Goldberg is no champion of their cause. Rather, she is seen as the liberal firebrand, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement during the ’60s who two years ago led the charge to force all companies doing business with the city to pay their workers a “living wage” $2 an hour above the minimum wage.

But closer scrutiny shows that Goldberg has developed into a far more pragmatic power broker in recent years. The evolution of the 54-year-old councilwoman is occurring simultaneously with (and possibly because of) the emergence of Hollywood as a redevelopment hotspot.

That crash course has her now embracing the notion that business can be a force for good.

“I’ve virtually gotten my MBA here,” she quipped. “I learned about business and property development and how they can be used as tools to help people in my district and throughout the city to get jobs.”

Some City Hall observers contend that Goldberg has become enamored with the power and prestige that has come with her relatively new role in brokering agreements with developers. “She’s gotten her first taste of economic development and she likes it,” one said.

Goldberg disputes such notions.

“I learned early on here that a lot of the goals I was pursuing living wage, better health benefits, etc. all derive from having good, quality jobs,” she said. “And that’s the reason why I started paying attention to economic development and the businesses in my district. You don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Not that she’s about to sit on many corporate boards. For years, the former teacher and Los Angeles Unified School Board president has had a decidedly social agenda, whether it’s pushing the living wage ordinance or challenging Proposition 187, which denied benefits to illegal aliens.

She also has clashed frequently and publicly with the business-minded Riordan. On a recent KFWB-AM 980 call-in show, he attacked Goldberg on her opposition to his business tax reform plan.

“Right now, the main person stopping this (business tax reform) is Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who, for reasons I don’t know, is showing a lack of leadership,” Riordan said. “She has fed false information to the media, such as that certain companies were given special treatment and had their taxes decreased, when in fact two of the three companies she mentioned will have increases in taxes.”

Goldberg denied that she did any such thing and characterized her conflict with Riordan as “a principled disagreement,” noting her genuine interest in tax reform.

“Look, this didn’t start out as a disagreement between me and the mayor,” Goldberg said. “When he first said he wanted to reform the business tax, I was all in favor of it. After all, I worked with the mayor on the only two tax cuts that had been enacted: the multimedia tax cut and the tax cut for telemarketers. There was no reason why this should have been any different.”

And while Riordan and Goldberg have feuded, their respective staffs are working behind the scenes in relative harmony on Hollywood redevelopment. In fact, City Hall observers have described it as one of the closest working relationships between a council member and Riordan.

Of course, both have a lot riding on the success of Hollywood revitalization.

“Jackie Goldberg has embraced the renaissance of Hollywood wholeheartedly and decided that it could not happen without working in lock-step with the mayor,” said Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo.

Goldberg herself described the relationship between her staff and the mayor’s staff as “seamless.” The result is that business leaders in her district are praising Goldberg, a turn of events that might have seemed unlikely, if not downright incredible, just a few years ago.

“I supported her opponent when she first ran for election,” said Terry Jorgensen, president of the Bank of Hollywood. “But I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see what she’s done for Hollywood. She’s done more in the past six years than the city had done in the previous 40 years.”

Developer Doug Brown, managing partner of Regent Properties, which is planning a 500,000-square-foot shopping mall at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street, said Goldberg has been honest and direct.

“She tells you what her true position is, and if there is a problem, she will let you know right away,” Brown said. “And if there is a disagreement, she is willing to think of innovative solutions.”

Even outside observers seem impressed with Goldberg’s grasp of business issues.

“When I first met her a year ago, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was not real clear about how she was going to redo Hollywood,” said David Runsten, an economist and professor at the UCLA School of Public Policy. “She came to talk to one of my classes and I was impressed with her grasp of the way the economy constrains policies. She seemed to understand very well the need for economic development, especially given the fiscal problems municipalities face in California. And, most importantly, she’s not afraid to support business.”

Not everyone is so complimentary.

Robert Nudelman, a Hollywood community activist, said Goldberg has dropped the ball on a transportation plan for the area. “It was supposed to be in place in May 1988, and reports are still sitting in the council office,” Nudelman said.

He was also critical of what he called her lack of leadership on efforts to protect the Cinerama Dome and Chinese Theatre. “At least she hasn’t opposed what we wanted to do, but she hasn’t been out in front either,” he said. “We have had to convince her to try to take a stand on these things.”

While Nudelman accuses Goldberg of being too soft on developers, Runsten of UCLA criticizes her for continuing to expect too much.

“There is still a tendency in her office to place too many conditions on things,” Runsten said. “She still tries to accomplish too much at times in the way of social policy as conditions on economic development projects, especially with smaller projects. Things like having to provide child care for a small tax break of a couple hundred dollars.”

Nevertheless, critics and supporters agree that Goldberg’s attitudes are clearly evolving. Some suggest the change may be a strategy to broaden her legacy as she seeks to position herself for a new post after being term-limited out of office in 2001. She has been rumored as a candidate for mayor or the state Assembly.

Goldberg herself says she has not yet decided what she wants to do after her term is up. “I’ll make that decision in about six months. But I can tell you that education has always been my first love. Now that we have Gray Davis as governor, there may be something in education I would like to pursue on the state level,” she said.

Amid all this evolution and power brokering, Goldberg has been in severe physical pain. She finally underwent back surgery in January to repair a herniated disk, forcing her to severely cut back her longstanding 10- to 12-hour workdays. Since then she’s been doing muscle exercises for two to three hours a day.

But just two weeks after her surgery, she returned to her post on the budget committee that was considering the Riordan tax plan. Between her peppering of consultants with questions, she would stand up and pace around the meeting room, in obvious pain. “Being a councilperson is a very sedentary job and I realize now I can’t sit as much as I used to,” she said.

Yet even severe pain seems an insufficient force to suppress Goldberg’s passions.

“If there is anything people should know about me, it is that once I become convinced about something, I become really passionate about it. And I don’t wait around to do it,” she said. “I’ve never been very good at playing it safe. You might see me compromise on details, but I won’t compromise on principle.”