Tracking the mayor

The Los Angeles Weekly takes a look at how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spends his days:
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of July 14, a week after quietly slipping home from a trip to Hawaii, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was halfway though a typical workday. He'd spent the morning doing interviews on two Latino radio stations, his picture was taken with an old friend, Juan Alvarez, he met with major labor union insider Sean Harrigan, he lunched with his staff, he was prepped by aides on what to say at an upcoming press conference urging Angelenos to vote for higher taxes, and he held a meeting to discuss one of his persisting embarrassments as mayor -- his failure to plant a promised "one million trees," or even a fraction of them, in Los Angeles.

As he began his closed-door meeting to review the million-trees fiasco, a loose coalition of angry community activists billing themselves as the Save L.A. Project stood on the steps of City Hall, venting frustration over the Los Angeles Unified School District, the mayor's stiff new rate increases on Angelenos' utility bills, and a controversy over alleged backroom talks by Villaraigosa's Planning Department "density hawks" about building yet another big-box project, this time a Home Depot in the Valley.