It was freezing in the Los Angeles City Council Chamber last Friday afternoon. “They must have turned off the heat,” another reporter said. Though it was 70 degrees outside, it felt like 40 indoors; I sneezed as I zipped up my jacket and put on my hat. You always get these portents when you least need them. Meanwhile, everyone else was standing and applauding something Richard Alatorre had said about the brilliant career he was relinquishing.It was quite a career, to hear the councilman tell it. But if you’d been around during the 27 years Richard Alatorre held office, you couldn’t help but feel that it had been mostly downhill after Alatorre’s breakthrough 1972 Assembly election delivered a bright-eyed, 28-year-old Eastsider into the den of some of state politics’ slickest operators. The skid began somewhere in the early ’80s, after Alatorre had helped set up the Agricultural Labor Relations Board for Governor Jerry Brown’s administration, completed several worthy redistricting proj ects and had, by later admission, learned how to snort.
Source: Adieu to Alatorre | L.A. Weekly