When Villaraigosa’s mayoral run ends June 30 due to term limits, he could use not just a job but one that affords him the multimillionaire lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed as a flamboyant public servant. His concerned allies have even determined how much Villaraigosa should earn: About $750,000 a year to replicate the life of luxury hotels, nomadic air travel, taxpayer-supplied Getty House mayoral mansion, thousand-dollar seats at sporting and entertainment events, SUV with Los Angeles Police Department security detail attached and innumerable evenings over fine food and wine paid for by wealthy friends and supporters.
Close associates and City Hall insiders, on and off the record, concur that Villaraigosa, the highest-paid mayor in the country, at $232,735 a year, is broke — and has next to nothing lined up. And the clock is ticking. In five weeks he’ll be shown the door at Getty House, the historic mansion in tony Windsor Square, which Villaraigosa surrounded two years ago with a controversial “security wall.”
Villaraigosa’s years of legally required “statements of economic interests” from 2001 through 2012 verify that, aside from a few thousand dollars he annually collects from a modest rental home he owns in Moreno Valley, he has no revenue streams, no financial investments. No stocks. No bonds. (The Weekly could not determine how much public pension Villaraigosa will collect, or when. Through a spokeswoman, Thomas Moutes, head of the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System, said LACERS has “no records” regarding this public information.)
Villaraigosa has been paid a total of $1,682,937 as mayor, a serious chunk of which, for the past several years, has gone to his ex-wife and children in alimony and child support. He has risen to the 1 percent, in practice if not in fact, by relying heavily on other people’s money. Taxpayers, private groups and foundations have footed huge travel bills, as Villaraigosa spent fully 42 percent of his official city working hours, according to his own calendar, out of town between Sept. 1 and Dec. 16 last year. His personal schedule also reflects, on the eve of his departure, a onetime man of the people who regularly sits down with billionaires such as Eli Broad and Forever 21 founder Do Won Chang — but rarely with activists or ordinary people who know firsthand what’s happening in L.A.’s communities.
