TIPOFF: ALARCON STARTS 2ND RACE - FOR AQMD SEAT.

Byline: Rick Orlov

COUNCILMAN Richard Alarcon must be a glutton for punishment.

As he prepares to campaign for the state Senate next year - against former Assemblyman Richard Katz for the seat held by Herschel Rosenthal - he is beginning a second race to be a smog fighter.

Alarcon has been lobbying the 25 representatives of the California League of Cities to vote for him to serve on the South Coast Air Quality Management District board when it meets in mid-July.

The seat has been held by outgoing Councilman Marvin Braude, who had enjoyed the support of Mayor Richard Riordan. Riordan is supporting Alarcon, who now must pick up 12 other votes.

``I asked the mayor about this the first year I was elected,'' Alarcon said. ``He said he wouldn't support anyone but Braude, but if an opening developed, he would back me.''

The AQMD has been in turmoil for the past months with controversy over director James Lents and board member Cody Cluff.

``I think, I hope, by the time I get there, all that will be resolved,'' Alarcon said.

It is every politician's dream to be on the same stage with the president of the United States.

But it becomes a nightmare when you are consigned to the back and are not even acknowledged.

That was the case for Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky when President Clinton spoke at Mar Vista Elementary School.

Neither the president, Mayor Richard Riordan nor any of the other speakers introduced the two, who stood along a side railing on the stage. And, it turns out, the president's staff had not even intended to invite both of them.

The White House had planned only to invite the official representing the area, whom they thought was Yaroslavsky. When told it was Burke, White House aides hemmed and hawed for a few moments and then allowed that it would be OK if Yaroslavsky attended.

To find out how to do something right, sometimes one has to find out what went wrong.

That must be the thinking for the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, which held an education conference earlier this month in Miami.

With the topic of ``Successful Strategies: Public and Private Ventures in the Building of School Facilities,'' the group turned to some Los Angeles officials with first-hand knowledge of school construction disasters with the Belmont Learning Center.

The two speakers were board member Vickie Castro and Don Shambra, the L.A. Unified's director of planning and development.

While the San Fernando Valley fumes at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over the lack of plans for a subway system, the real blame might lie among our local officials who have been outwitted and outmaneuvered.

For instance, Rep. Esteban Torres, D-Pico Rivera, last week slyly ensured his favorite subway project, the east-side extension of the Red Line, will get built by earmarking $24 million of the MTA's rail funding to begin construction on the project next year.

Torres and other east-siders worried about the MTA's future and its impacts on the east-side line know that Congress would be unwilling to walk away from the project once ground was broken.

But Torres didn't stop there. During behind-the-scenes negotiations on this year's rail funding bill, Torres reportedly wanted to earmark even more money for the east-side project's second phase, which isn't supposed to be built until after a line across the San Fernando Valley, sometime well in the next century.

MTA officials were able to head him off on that proposal, however.

``We called the committee staff and told them you don't even want to begin to open up that battle,'' said one key agency supporter. ``You don't need to do it now and the agency doesn't need it now.''