Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis danced cautiously around some controversial topics when she spoke to a downtown crowd of political insiders and power brokers Wednesday.

She was the speaker at the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon, run by public affairs consultant Emma Schafer, who also compiles the political blog Emma’s Memos. Lawyers, transportation business executives and engineering firm representative were in the audience at The Palm. Solis is a good person for them to know. Most have business with either the county or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Solis is not only a member of the five- person Board of Supervisors, which has influence on projects throughout the county, but she is also on the MTA board, in charge of building and running transit lines.

I’d never heard Solis, who was elected to succeed Gloria Molina last year after serving as U.S. labor secretary and a member of Congress. She had little opposition and few campaign appearances. I had a much clearer take on Sheila Kuehl, who was speaking all over the place in her intense race with Bobby Shriver. So I was curious. Solis is sharp, pleasant and has a practiced technique of smiling her way through troublesome questions without giving much of an answer.

I asked her about her stand on future negotiations with the unions, which represent county workers. The county unions supported Kuehl in that election and previously enthusiastically helped elect Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas. That gives the unions three friendly seats on the board. Molina and then Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, while liberal Democrats, often tangled the unions.

She said she’d approach the matter “very diligently." What’s she going to do in negotiations? Determine costs of proposals to see what the county can support. She said it would be a challenge. The only light she shed on the subject was to say she’d be “a big change from being antagonistic.” The blunt Molina was famous for not getting along with people, some of them union leaders.

Solis was also cautious in discussing two projects—approval of a big hotel-apartment-retail development on Bunker Hill downtown and completion of the 710 Freeway. The freeway project would have to be environmentally sound and the Bunker Hill development would have to serve more than rich people, she said. She is chair of the Grand Avenue Authority, the city- county body overseeing Bunker Hill development.

A laborers’ union executive was at the head table and his members build freeways, office buildings, hotels and much more. So Solis made it clear that her comments on the projects doesn’t mean she’s hostile to construction. She talked positively about the MTA transit projects underway, words pleasing to the union leaders and transportation engineers and lobbyists in the room. They came to lunch for that kind of reassurance.

The National Football League is a heartless, unreliable lover, as the star- struck city councils of Carson and Inglewood will no doubt find out.

The Carson City Council Tuesday night approved a vague proposal for a stadium that, local dreamers hope, will provide a home for transplanted Oakland Raiders and San Diego Charger teams. With just as little debate, the Inglewood council earlier approved a stadium plan for the St. Louis Rams on the Hollywood Park racetrack site.

The three teams are trying to bludgeon their home cities into providing them with new stadiums. It’s a reprise of an act that has been done in past years by other teams hoping for a better deal.

The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Logan and Nathan Fenno wrote how the Carson proposal, approved 3-0, lacked details and quoted a city-funded report saying, “As of the date completion of this report, no official project design documents have been provided by the stadium developer.” All that is really known is that the proposal includes a three-way land deal involving the Chargers, Carson and the property’s current owner.

Anyone who has covered a city hall knows that a three-way land deal is so full of loopholes, twists and turns, unfathomable clauses, and escape hatches that it usually amounts to a give away to one or more of the parties.

I learned about sports contracts when I wrote about the long, secretive negotiations that preceded the construction of the Staples arena in Los Angeles—secret until opened up by then-Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs with some help from me and my column.

My colleague Henry Weinstein and I dealt with the NFL and the Raiders on a daily basis when the Raiders were moving to LA. The hard-nosed and slick league officials and team owners stonewalled us until we found an executive who, because he liked the Times, told us pretty much the truth.

Secret deals by Carson and Inglewood officials are shaping this. The NFL likes the secrecy. The league uses it to attain its only goal, stadiums financed by taxpayers one way or another. On its way, the NFL may leave a trail of broken hearts in Carson and Inglewood, which is already mourning the losses of professional teams that played in the Forum and the horses that used to run at Hollywood Park.

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When politicians publish their memoirs, they too often bore readers with safe accounts of their triumphs, skimming or ignoring the bad stuff. Not Richard J. Riordan. In his enlightening book, “The Mayor”, he tells of the tragedies in his life and of his extra-marital affairs, divorces and drinking. These details add a very human touch to his story of the eight successful years he served as mayor of Los Angeles.

Riordan and I will talk about the book, written with Los Angeles Weekly journalist Patrick Range McDonald, and his years as mayor on Saturday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC. It will be at 1:30 p.m. at the Norris Auditorium and given our prickly, friendly and volatile relationship over the years, it should be fun.

Two of his children died—a son in a scuba diving accident, a daughter of illness related to anorexia. A brother was killed in a storm-induced landslide while reading in his Los Angeles home. A sister died of burns after her nightgown caught fire from a fireplace. “Too many martinis which led to flirtations at the bar” doomed his marriage to his first wife, Genie. Alcohol led to two arrests for driving under the influence and another for interfering with cops trying to arrest a friend in a bar. And that’s just by page 59.

Beyond that, Riordan provides an interesting look at his time as mayor. His first big crisis was the earthquake early in the morning of Jan.17, 1994. He tells how “The Bel Air home of my future wife, Nancy Daly, shook so violently that I was jolted out of bed and found myself lying on my back on the carpeted bedroom floor,” he wrote. The phones were dead. He headed for city hall, dropping Daly off at her mother’s retirement home, maneuvered onto the Santa Monica Freeway, was sidetracked by the collapsed La Cienega overpass. He finally made his way downtown on city streets, taking charge of the city’s emergency command center.

That established him as mayor. He also reveals details of his efforts to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District, his successful campaign for a charter revision that increased the power of the mayor and his efforts to increase the size of the Los Angeles Police Department. Unfortunately, he is a staunch defender of the department under his administration and of its then secretive, micromanaging chief, Bernard Parks. He, like Parks, treated the Rampart scandal as if it were an annoying station house screw-up instead being an example of major corruption. He still hates the federal decree that forced LAPD reform.

Riordan reminds us of other accomplishments—the Alameda rail corridor, which promoted harbor growth, and his part in the Staples Center and Disney Hall projects, major components of the downtown revival.

When he was mayor, he was a perfect subject for my Los Angeles Times column and I followed him around L.A. in search of anecdotes. Occasionally, he’d invite me to breakfast at his downtown diner, the Original Pantry, and berate me about the Times’ shortcomings over deliciously unhealthy breakfasts. Afterward, we’d walk around the block, while he puffed on a cigar and continued his negative thoughts on the paper. When I criticized him in a column, he’d call my home early in the morning to complain and I would argue back. During a huge fire, I blasted him for praising Los Angeles firefighters and ignoring the many others who had come from all over the state to fight the flames. I said he was acting as if he were a provincial small town hack. The next morning, the phone rang. “I read your column this morning,” Riordan said. “Oh,” I said, preparing for a fight. “You were right,” he said.

He was and is a quirky, unconventional character and hopefully he’ll show some of this when we talk at the book festival Saturday.