Richard J. Riordan

Richard J. Riordan served as thirty-ninth mayor of Los Angeles from June 1993 to June 2001. As mayor, Riordan focused his efforts on making Los Angeles safer, creating quality jobs throughout the city, making government more efficient, making neighborhoods healthier, and reforming the public education system.

During his first term, he created the Mayor’s Alliance for a Safer Los Angeles, a public/private partnership that raised $16 million to computerize records and information for the Los Angeles Police Department. With technology as a tool, police officers are able to spend less time behind desks and more time protecting and serving Angelenos.

Riordan’s reform efforts changed the way Los Angeles does business. As a means to create economic opportunities, Riordan made international trade a top priority. In 1997, he created the International Trade Initiative to enhance Los Angeles’ position as a world leader and location for international trade in the twenty-first century.

Riordan’s focus on healthy neighborhoods led to community-based action throughout the city. The mayor’s Volunteer Bureau saves city taxpayers more than $30 million each year by mobilizing more than 30,000 community-spirited volunteers throughout the Los Angeles area. He also created the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative, a community-based effort designed to improve transit-dependent areas and established one dozen Targeted Neighborhood Initiatives that give citizens a say over community issues.

Riordan devoted his second term to the challenge of providing quality education for all children. The mayor strongly believes that every child deserves the tools to compete in society: reading, writing, and problem-solving skills. Riordan launched “Read to Me,” a city-wide reading program that encourages parents and caregivers to begin reading to their children at an early age, in 1998. Long before his first election, he was actively involved in education issues, creating the Riordan Fellowship and Riordan Scholars programs, which fund college-level business studies for high school students. He is a founding member of the acclaimed LEARN effort and of BEST (Better Educated Students for Tomorrow), a nationally recognized after-school program serving more than 5,000 children in Los Angeles’ disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Riordan graduated from Princeton University in 1952 with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and he served in the Korean War as a field artillery lieutenant for the U.S. Army. Following an honorable discharge, he earned his law degree at the University of Michigan.