New pols turn to City Hall veterans

Two newly elected L.A. politicians have turned to seasoned City Hall policymakers to help them navigate their new jobs.

City Atty.-elect Carmen Trutanich hired Jane Usher, the former Planning Commission president who played a major role in his campaign, as a senior advisor. Meanwhile, Councilman-elect Paul Koretz selected as his chief of staff Rich Llewellyn, a high-level official with City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

"I think he is absolutely the most experienced and most qualified person I possibly could have chosen,” said Koretz, who will represent parts of the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

Trutanich and Koretz both take office  July 1.

Llewellyn was Delgadillo’s chief deputy for the last four years and before that was Councilman Eric Garcetti’s chief of staff. About a decade ago, he was special counsel to Garcetti’s father, then-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

Llewellyn was one of several Delgadillo employees who received tenure in recent years, a situation that prompted some worries from the Trutanich camp. Trutanich aides said they feared that if those higher- paid employees stayed, it would be harder to find the money to assemble a new Trutanich team.

Usher worked for Mayor Tom Bradley and more recently spent three years as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s top appointee on the powerful Planning Commission. Although she hosted a fundraiser for Villaraigosa during the 2005 mayoral campaign, she broke with him in this year’s city attorney race, favoring Trutanich over Councilman Jack Weiss.

While she was on the commission, Usher annoyed some city officials after she sent an e-mail to neighborhood activists telling them how they could file a legal challenge to a new law that gave major concessions to developers that put at least some affordable housing in their residential projects. After they received the e-mail, neighborhood groups filed a lawsuit against the city.

-- David Zahniser

Comments

[maria]

Trutanich actually announced several months ago, at a backyard Holmby Hills fundraiser to well over a hundred people, on March 27th, that he intended to appoint Jane Usher his Chief of Staff if elected.

However this was not widely announced and in fact, as recently as the day after the election on May 20th, Usher told SOHA (the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.) that there was to that date no agreement between them of any kind.

Perhaps this was so that she could continue to act on his behalf as a "spokeswoman" when convenient (e.g., as quoted in a May 4th tv interviiew with John North, who tried to make sense of her and Trutanich's conversations with Erwin Chemerinksy, Dean of UCI Law School, to whom she did not reveal any connection to Trutanich in trying to falsely depict Chemerinsky's views as supporting Trutanich's hiding of client list).

Usher was also the subject of fthe (notoriously anti- Villaraigosa) L A Weekly's piece "Usher Slams Gail Goldberg," without revealing any connection to Trutanich, on whose behalf she continuously lobbied, appeared at debates on behalf of, and threw a fundraiser for back in February.

Therefore the relationship between Koretz (whose election was just very recently certified) and Llewellyn, who until now has been expected to stay on at the City Attorney' office where he's clearly not wanted, are in no ways similar.

[Dennis Hathaway]

One of the charges most commonly raised during the hotly-contested 5th District City Council race was that Paul Koretz was a political insider who didn't promise any break with the incestuous political culture of city hall. By choosing the chief of staff of the highly ambitious Delgadillo, whose blunders and ethical lapses led to this newspaper actually calling for his resignation, Koretz has at least partially confirmed the validity of that charge. When the city desperately needs new ideas and a break with the ethics and culture of the past, he has reached right back into that past to find his most important aide.

[Kelvin]

CD5 waits with nervous trepidation to find out of Koretz's hiring of Rich Llewellyn is going to be a good thing or a bad thing for them. It could work either way. Yes, Llewellyn is well versed with the ways of city hall, but then again it's vital for any newcomer to have the benefit of a little inside knowledge. Will Llewellyn steer Koretz into the hands of the special interests that blighted Jack Weiss's career? That remains to be seen. One thing is certain, Llewellyn is not stupid. He has seen what happened to Weiss and perhaps will use his skill and knowledge to guide Koretz away from making the mistakes Weiss made.