Days from the start of his second term, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has earned tepid job approval ratings from city voters, and a plurality opposes his entrance into the upcoming race for governor, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll.
Los Angeles' brooding electorate, battered by job losses and home foreclosures that rise above national and state trends, feels strongly that the city is on the wrong track. And almost half believes the city needs to move in a direction different from that charted by Villaraigosa, rebuking the policies of a mayor they reelected a little more than three months ago.
Although they consider the city's budget deficit an urgent problem, voters steadfastly oppose raising taxes or fees to stem the deepening fiscal crisis. Even the notion of increasing taxes to improve fire protection, a comparatively easy sell in wildfire-prone Southern California, was rejected handily.
Villaraigosa received a favorable job approval rating from 55% of the registered voters surveyed. The showing is statistically equivalent to the vote he won in the city's March election against a field of little-known and underfunded candidates. He officially begins his second term July 1.
For Villaraigosa, who casts himself as a unifying political force in the mold of five-term Mayor Tom Bradley, the survey also indicated some fraying in the broad ethnic coalition that carried him into office in 2005. Almost three-fourths of Latino voters gave the mayor high marks, as did almost two out of three African Americans, but a narrow plurality of white voters gave him negative grades.
The city's precipitous drop in crime won Villaraigosa his highest praise -- he received a 69% approval rating on handling crime. Voters also approved of his efforts to make Los Angeles a more environmentally friendly city, but scorched him on the city's budget deficit and the quality of the public schools, which ranked higher among their top concerns.
"I've actually been impressed with some of the things they've done with crime, to bring crime down. I've also been impressed because he's been so prolific. . . . He's all over town," Christopher Knudsen of Van Nuys, an unemployed recruiter for financial firms, said in a follow-up interview.
Michael Ortega of Harbor City, who was among the respondents unhappy with the mayor's tenure, said Villaraigosa appears to be more concerned about furthering his political career than serving the people of Los Angeles.
