Candidate for
Mayor; City of Los Angeles

As City Attorney for Los Angeles, I have developed innovative strategies to tackle tough problems like gangs and gun violence. As the next Mayor, I will build on our current successes, while continuing to take on the tough challenges facing our city.

As the next Mayor, I will work to make Los Angeles the safest big city in America. I will work to improve our schools, ease the gridlock on our streets, improve the quality of life in neighborhoods, and ensure that our economic prosperity continues in the years ahead. Times are great, but there are still many challenges that confront us in order to make Los Angeles the leading city of the 21st century.

As the campaign moves forward I will post on this part of my web page position papers on the key challenges facing our city, and what I will do as mayor to meet those challenges. I hope you will continue to check back in the months ahead to learn more about my goals and plans as the next Mayor. Today, let me outline just a few of the important issues I will focus on during the campaign:

· EDUCATION: The future of our city will depend on the educational opportunities we provide for our children today. Los Angeles must form a new partnership with the school district to ensure that children are receiving the best possible education so they have the opportunity to excel.

· TRANSPORTATION: The daily gridlock on our city's roads and freeways is not only frustrating and hurts our quality of life, but costs our city hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity. We must not only fast-track short term solutions to immediately ease traffic snarls, but we must focus on long term strategies and solutions that will prepare us for our city's continued growth in the year's ahead.

· PUBLIC SAFETY: My goal as the next Mayor will be to make Los Angeles the safest big city in America. As the City Attorney for Los Angeles, I tackled tough problems like gangs, guns, domestic violence, elder abuse, and consumer fraud. The City must increase its focus on fighting gangs, and removing illegal weapons from our streets, but we must also recommit ourselves to community policing and targeting the sources of neighborhood crime.

· ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: After many lean years, Los Angeles' economy is once again booming. But we can not rest on our success. We must build on efforts to make Los Angeles more business friendly in order to attract more companies and jobs to the city. As Mayor, I will ensure that Los Angeles is a good place for "new economy" businesses, while also seeing that areas in our city that have still been left behind in the current boom receive the resources they need to prosper.

These are just some of the issues I will be speaking about during the campaign, and I hope you will check back as we post more information on our site. Additionally, please provide feedback through our web site about the issues you are interested to hear debated during the campaign. Thank you for your interest.