The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling him (if only in my column) to recheck that mayoral job description – which says that he only gets to run the city.Reminders of this legal stricture cannot hush the mighty mayoral mouth, however, which never stops singing that old school song. As the city’s fortunes wax and wane, increasingly irrespective of the mayor’s stewardship, the mayor at every public opportunity – inauguration, state-of-the-city speeches – lunges for school authority. While his keepers (one hopes) and I continuously attempt to restrain him with reminders of his constitutional inhibitions.How frustrating this must be! If only things were different, Riordan must dream every night. If only, say, our state’s Legislature would do for our mayor what those Illinois lawmakers did for Chicago’s Richard Daley, when they enacted a special statute making him tyrant of that city’s school district. What fun something like that would be for our mayor! And still more, what a great deal for the more than 600,000 schoolchildren of Los Angeles!Well, maybe. Except that, when it comes to one of the few official city obligations that actually connect the mayor and the kids, the mayor recently dropped the ball.The issue here is the city’s role in budgeting after-school plans. Last fiscal year, the city contributed $3.5 million to the LAUSD’s Extended Recreation Program. According to one city report, the city was extending non-year-round schools’ supervised “playground hours by two hours during the summer months,” with similar hours “provided to certain year-round schools.” The city basically paid for two adult supervisors per playground to keep kids busy and out of trouble until their parents got home.But this year, the LAUSD board, citing its own budget problems, apparently decided to cut the entire program drastically. City officials, fearing the adverse social consequences of having fewer children in recreation programs and hence more kids on the street, objected. Regardless, the allegedly kid-loving mayor’s 1998-99 fiscal-year budget this spring cut out the city’s contribution. On March 24, the LAUSD issued a memo noting this omission and officially proclaiming the programs’ end. This must have caught Riordan’s attention, because three days later he memoed the City Council defensively.”This is untrue,” Riordan said in his own memo, adding that he had met with LAUSD Superintendent Ruben Zacarias the previous week. Noting the city’s $100 million budget gap, Riordan said he’d asked Zacarias “if he could continue the Extended Recreation Program without the city’s $3.5 million subsidy.” The superintendent, according to the mayor, responded positively, stating that the district, in the mayor’s words, “would and must find a way” to fund the programs.What ho, though. It seems that our mayor somehow forgot that Zacarias, for all his exalted status and salary, is really just the hired help, the top staff guy in the school district. He can’t promise to allocate anything without the authority of the elected school board. Which he didn’t have.Recommended videosPowered by AnyClip NOW PLAYINGTrump Says ‘Perhaps Illegal’ Lawyers Recording Clients‘The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold’ Gets Premiere DateMichael Cohen Is Ready To Spill The BeansAG Sessions: ‘Perhaps’ It Was Wrong To Laugh Along With ‘Lock Her Up’ ChantPompeo Says Trump has ‘Proper Understanding’ Of Russian MeddlingNK diplomacy won’t “drag out to no end”: PompeoUFC Superstar Conor McGregor Pleads Guilty to Disorderly ConductTurkey Responds To US, Says It Will Not Tolerate ThreatsYouTube Pulls Four Videos From InfoWarsPiers Morgan Defends Himself From Stephen Colbert CommentsSo whatever Zacarias may have told the mayor (who, after all, has managed to create miserable relationships between himself and board members), those formerly city-assisted after-hours programs are still going down the tubes, unless the board re-draws its budget. Or unless perhaps our Legislature and governor agree to pour a bit of the state’s current $4.4 billion surplus into education. In any case, the matter of keeping the programs alive relegated itself not to the Mayor’s Office, but to the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee. The committee’s proposal for a million-dollar stopgap to save a city-related school-assistance program goes to the council next month. Which may yet preserve the schoolyard program from the complete negligence of a school-infatuated mayor who still hasn’t figured out how the local school system he wants to run really works.Hard TimesBob Erlenbusch, a champion of L.A.’s homeless, had long ago promised us a real demonstration last week at the Hall of Administration. But I had no idea just how real it was going to be: