KTLA News: "Days after taking office Tom Bradley holds meeting with city department heads" (1973)

[Tom Bradley] On my trip to Washington, one of the things that  I became very much convinced of is that they mean business. It is not simply idle talk, not  just posturing on their part, but they mean business when they tell us that there are a number of things that must be done here in Los Angeles and in our greater community, if we're gonna deal with this question of the purity of the air. And so I want you to approach it not on the basis of how can we get around it, how can we avoid it. Look upon it as a crisis that we simply are going to have to deal with. [ambient noise] ....men. Welcome to what is going to be the first of a  series of such conferences on our part. I plan to have a cabinet-style meeting with department heads on a regular basis to discuss the issues of the city, the problems that we face, and your relationship to those problems and to each other. It seems to me that no single department or even a half a dozen of them can begin to address itself or themselves to the nature of our problems  without understanding how you fit into the whole scheme of things. And so it is my intention that we're going to be partners in this operation. And it is for that reason that I'm starting this type concept. I hope that you will understand that as we begin it, we will be making changes as we go along. And I will welcome your recommendations and your ideas as to how we're going to do it. I hope that you will have the sense of freedom to say whatever is on your mind here in this meeting or at any time that you and I shall meet together. I also want to make it very clear that there will be times when smaller units of department heads will be meeting to discuss some issues. There will be occasions when you will want to discuss with me problems of your own departments. I want you to feel free to come in, to call, to ask, to talk to us about them. Now we've been rather busy in the last few days trying to get things organized so I have not had a chance to talk with you individually. But starting next week, we will begin scheduling meetings with individual departments so that we can get more directly to the problems affecting your departments. So you can expect a call from  one of the staff people in my office to arrange for those meetings. We'll try to get to all of you as quickly as we can. If you have an urgent matter, I don't want you to wait until you come  to the point in time when you will be scheduled into the office. You feel free to call me about something that you consider to be very urgent and we'll just squeeze you in no matter what the schedule looks like. Now there are a number of items that I just want to touch upon and then we're going to have the press leave and permit you to get more directly into... [Bradley] ...recently adopted and which as you well know contains expenditures at the rate that we are within our projected income, but which I think will lead us into trouble next year. Because we had a windfall of 23 million dollars this year that we will not have again next year, there are some other items that I think if they are implemented to the extent indicated in the budget could carry us to a point... ...to ask for your cooperation. I've already sent you a directive asking for your reaction and evaluation of the guidelines that were suggested by the Environmental Protection Agency. We are facing that deadline very quickly now as you well know. [Bradley] Make some... sense of the Data Service Bureau. [Bradley] ...if concern to us as we talk about these budget cuts. It's a question of how we can  get better employee productivity. I think if we look at the rise in the population rate in our city and the problems, we could question whether or not we're getting the kind of increase in productivity commensurate with some of the other increases that we're experiencing. And I want you to look at every possibility that you can find of increasing productivity, improving morale, and at the same time having people understand how, with, what I think is the best civil service system in the country there are still ways in which we can improve it. There are still ways in which we can improve the production of our employees. I want you to be very vigorous in your efforts as general managers and pursuing that with your supervisors to actually be out in the field where your employees are very largely field forces, to see whether or not there is any way in which either their conduct is subjecting us to adverse criticism, or whether there is something that we can do to require a little better performance on their part, and in some cases just the semblance of really being on the job. And I'll give you one example. I've  driven about this city and I've seen truck...