Austin Beutner Calls City Hall a 'Barnyard' Filled With Career Politicians

Austin Beutner, an investment banker who was Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's jobs czar for more than a year and is running for mayor, delivered a speech Thursday billed as a plan to get Angelenos back to work.

During a speech to a crowd of about 100 attending a Town Hall Los Angeles speakers forum at the Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Beutner cited six areas he would focus on as mayor to create jobs and improve the region's economy.

Modernizing Los Angeles International Airport and the Port of Los Angeles to increase trade would be his top priority, he said. The other five areas include enhancing or growing education, tourism, transportation, manufacturing and supporting small businesses.

He called a proposed high-speed rail project endorsed by City Councilman Eric Garcetti, another mayoral candidate,  a "solution in search of a problem." He endorsed a proposed NFL stadium downtown.

Beutner, who served as a deputy mayor to Mayor Villaraigosa for about 14 months, attacked City Hall, calling it a "barnyard" filled with career politicians and lacking transparency and accountability, a thinly veiled attack against three other candidates in the mayoral race -- City Controller Wendy Greuel and City Council members Jan Perry and Eric Garcetti.

Beutner accused council members of inflating their own salaries and spending too much time introducing motions that don't benefit constituents.

"It is any council person's right to bring a motion to the floor. They certainly use that privilege richly," Beutner said during a round-table question-and-answer session with reporters after the speech. "Every single topic that might ever occur to their constituents or themselves seems to deserve a motion ... Let's measure what difference anything that's been done in city council in the last many years has done for the lives of Angelenos."

Perry defended the City Council and described Beutner as out of touch with how democracy and city government works. "He should know, if he wants to be mayor, salaries were set by the voters as part of an ethics reform package," Perry said. "He's clearly unfamiliar with what it means to be in a legislative body. He's a Wall Street person who's accustomed to telling people what to do, and government and democracy is a process that is done in a very transparent and open way."

Beutner said the high-speed rail project would draw money from Los Angeles that could go to building the region's own transportation network and fixing $3 billion to $4 billion in street and sidewalk repairs.

He said he would put an initiative on the ballot asking voters to pull out of the project and support bonds for local transit projects. "Money is fungible," Beutner said.

He also called for replacing the city's tourism and marketing office, L.A. Inc., with a new tourism office that would be a public-private partnership modeled after New York City's.

The mayoral election is not until March 2013, but Beutner said he has already held more than 300 events to drum up support for his candidacy. He declined to discuss his fundraising efforts to date.

Beutner said he would be willing to spend some of his own money on his campaign. "I'm not trying to buy a trophy for the mantle," he said. "I'll support what we're doing, but I want to see if Angelenos will as well."

-- City News Service