Recently, Joel Fox the editor of Fox and Hounds Daily, an online political newsletter widely read around the state, wrote an article titled Will a Business Leader become LA's Next Mayor?

While I won't try to predict the outcome of the mayoral race in 2013, as the field of candidates is just beginning to gel, there was one statement that Fox made that I felt needed to be clarified.

In his column he wrote: "A number of analysts looking at the coming mayor's race feel the environment is similar to the time Republican attorney and businessman Richard Riordan captured the mayor's office in 1993. The opportunity may be there for a business executive to take control of the city government once again."

This section is where I find the most disagreement — and by the way who are these analysts?

The atmosphere that existed in Los Angeles in 1993 is a far cry from the current city we all now live in.

One only need look at the crime rates as reported by the California Dept of Justice. You can see that since 1993, homicides, rape and robbery are all at record lows.

There is also another major element missing from the 1993 mayoral playbook - a recent race riot. The city of Los Angeles was a different place after the Rodney King verdict, and is a completely changed place today. Heck, one only need to be in West Hollywood this past weekend to see people of every race, creed and sexual orientation celebrating each other's diversity in one of the largest PRIDE parades in the United States. (To be fair this was in the city of West Hollywood, however one can easily surmise many of the participants were local Angelinos.)

Next, the 1993 mayor's race was only eight little years from the frightening gas explosion in March of 1985 where a local Ross Store was destroyed because of methane gas underneath it - this little event served as an end to all mass-rail transportation along LA's busiest corridor.

Fast forward to today. We now have a major local stimulus working its way down the pipe in the form of Measure R. ($40 billion invested in Los Angeles) This will have the added effect of connecting many more communities with each other in a more socially dynamic way via subway, thus helping us celebrate our diversity, not deny it.

Lastly, California was still in a deep recession in 1993. Today, it appears by all economic standards we have seen the last of the Bush near-Depression that he inflicted on this nation. Come 2013 we should be on a more solid economic footing - one only need look at the $6 billion boon in taxes that arrived in Sacramento recently to know Los Angeles is about a year away from seeing its mini-boon too.

And who will be handing the next mayor of Los Angeles record low crime, new investments in an unprecedented transportation network connecting language, culture and people, while handing off a city trending in the black on the economic scales?

Just your friendly Latino-Labor-Democratic Mayor named - Antonio Villaraigosa.

No Joel - 2013 is nothing like 1993, and to that I say "Thank God."

Michael Trujillo, a longtime Villaraigosa political operative, is a political consultant who grew up in the Valley and who now lives Downtown. He says he's unaffiliated in the 2013 race for mayor.