Community Redevelopment Agency

The City Council on Friday unanimously approved three appointments to the Community Redevelopment Agency after winning a commitment from Mayor Richard Riordan's office that one of three upcoming openings will be filled by a South-Central resident. The concession defused a months-long conflict over the geographical diversity of some city commissions.

The three people chosen Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown to dismantle Los Angeles' sprawling, half-century-old redevelopment agency are not strangers to the real estate business or city politics. One is an attorney and City Hall lobbyist, another a consultant who once worked closely with the redevelopment agency, and the chair of the new panel led a firm that was Los Angeles' largest owner of upscale downtown office space. The City Council jettisoned its redevelopment agency two weeks ago. The three-person panel is required by state law because L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the council opted not to step in and assume the risk of unwinding the agency's hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, complex land deals, employee obligations and development loans.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has entered the fray over the future of Los Angeles Theatre Center. The mayor has called for the Community Redevelopment Agency to help the financially troubled center "continue operations through its summer and winter seasons." The agency, which has spent more than $19 million on LATC's Spring Street facility since 1978, has allocated $750,000 for LATC facilities support as a contingency item in its budget for the coming fiscal year starting July 1.

Aaron Epstein, a Hollywood businessman, got an offer recently that a lot of people in his situation would have leapt at. Hey, said City Hall, would you like a handout, Mr. Epstein? If so, we'll give you money — as much as $200,000 — to spruce up your building, inside and out. It's all part of a Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency program to brighten up Hollywood Boulevard, and Epstein is one of dozens of business owners eligible for cash loans. And the deal gets better.

The vacant and boarded up St. Andrew's Court is the type of Southern California housing they don't make anymore: a tan horseshoe of 16 gabled bungalows that face a narrow courtyard shaded by brawny old ficus and Victorian box trees. Birds dart in and out of the overgrowth, and a concrete fountain rests in the center. Built in 1919, St. Andrew's Court radiates an incongruous serenity in a neighborhood where signs warn against those stopping to buy drugs. Soon St. Andrew's Court, on North St.

A sharply divided Los Angeles City Council on Monday adopted a $3.8-billion budget that includes an unprecedented diversion of funds from the Community Redevelopment Agency to preserve police and fire services targeted for reduction in Mayor Tom Bradley's budget. The council voted 8 to 7 to take $48.3 million from the semi-independent redevelopment agency to pay for expanding the downtown Convention Center, refurbishing the Central Library and other projects.

There is no point in rehashing the circumstances that led to the collapse of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. It's over. Finished. Gone. We stand at this moment with this audacious, controversial company disbanded and the city's Cultural Affairs Department in charge of a so-called caretaker plan for the vacant four-theater Spring Street complex it once inhabited--an empty vessel with no characteristic properties of its own, ready for the imprint of its next tenants.

It was to be a model low-income housing project, one that the city of Los Angeles and municipalities everywhere could look to when trying to build apartments that were not only affordable, but livable as well. The experimental Franklin-La Brea project in Hollywood, after all, was to be a "case study," designed by a renowned architect and chosen through a design contest sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It may be an extremely ugly affair. Every two years, the seven commissioners of the Community Redevelopment Agency hold a public meeting to solicit input on the CRA's $922-million Hollywood redevelopment project, a beleaguered undertaking that has met with more opposition, scorn and bad publicity than perhaps any other project in the redevelopment agency's history. The next biennial meeting is set for Oct. 25 at 7 p.m.

The Community Redevelopment Agency meeting hadn't even begun, and already the gadflies were buzzing. As pinstriped bureaucrats filed into one side of the city agency's downtown conference room, graying men and women on the other side cackled over jokes about "this rubber-stamp agency," "the Bradley machine" and "gangster boss commissioners." Slow-growth advocates scoured the agenda for fodder for their regular attacks on the CRA.

For months, California's redevelopment system, which provides tax incentives for the improvement of communities deemed "blighted," has been hanging by a thread. Gov. Jerry Brown is seeking to eliminate the state's community redevelopment agencies in order to use their money to balance the state budget. Advocates of the agencies, meanwhile, have scrambled to present alternatives and to answer those critics who say redevelopment is plagued by abuse. That debate still is playing out in the Capitol, but one welcome result has been the introduction of two bills intended to clean up some of the problems with the agencies if they survive their brush with extermination.

In Southern California, there's nothing like a very large piece of real estate to cause discord. And the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station is nothing if not a large piece of real estate. Ever since the military decided to unload the base in the 1990s, Orange County residents have been bickering over what to do with the land, and the decision in 2005 to turn it into the Great Park hasn't ended the conflict. But first the history. Even before the military moved out, county residents divided into two bitterly opposing camps: those who supported using the site for a commercial airport and those who envisioned it as a vast and impressive park.

Ever since Gov. Jerry Brown proposed patching one of the huge holes in California's budget by eliminating community redevelopment agencies, supporters of those agencies and their mission have been scrambling to save them or, failing that, to save the essence of them. That's a worthy campaign, because the redevelopment system, despite its flaws and susceptibility to abuse, does provide a useful tool for revitalizing blighted areas, creating jobs and supplying much-needed support for affordable housing.

Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to eliminate community redevelopment agencies throughout the state may have been made with the best of intentions. But it's overkill. California's system for redevelopment is far from perfect, and it would benefit from implementing key reforms. And in many cases, redevelopment agencies should be contributing more to local government coffers. But simply abolishing the state's network of redevelopment agencies would hurt the people and communities most in need of the jobs and housing created by public investment.

Los Angeles redevelopment commissioners agreed Thursday to spend up to $52 million to build parking and other improvements around billionaire Eli Broad's planned downtown art museum, an action characterized by some as an attempt to keep future tax dollars out of state hands. The deal was put together so quickly that the final agreement was still being drafted as the commission, which oversees the Community Redevelopment Agency, prepared to cast votes. Initially, commissioners were asked to vote without reviewing it. But they backtracked after one commissioner, Madeline Janis, said it was unwise to move so quickly without first seeing an agreement in writing.

Once a dictator ? Re " 'Baby Doc' returns to tense Haiti," Jan. 17 It has been speculated that former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier returned to Haiti after a 25-year forced exile because loyalists want him to be the leader of Haiti once again, this time in a democratic capacity. But how can a ruthless dictator who for 15 years engineered a reign of terror in Haiti (much like his father before him) ever be expected to rule democratically? It just isn't in his blood or his nature.

Have you been to the Grand Hope Park (9th & Hope, Los Angeles)? Wildflowers are in bloom. It would make a nice home for the homeless. Plenty of room for tents, toilets, showers. And, say, isn't the Community Redevelopment Agency trying to encourage people to make their homes in that neighborhood? TOM McNAMARA Los Angeles

Appointees of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are at odds over a plan to lure a garment factory to South Los Angeles, sparking a debate over just how far the city should go to attract jobs in a dismal economy. With unemployment at double-digit levels, the Community Redevelopment Agency has offered to give a real estate company two industrial buildings that were purchased by the city in 2007 for $2.7 million. Pacific Center Place agreed to fix up those buildings and lease them to D&J Sportswear, an apparel company looking to relocate from South Gate.

Voters in Los Angeles' 2nd Council District go to the polls Tuesday to elect a successor to former Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who was elected city controller earlier this year. Ten candidates are running. If none emerges from the special election with more than 50% of the vote, there will be a runoff Dec. 8 between the top two finishers. The Times has endorsed former Paramount Pictures Corp. executive Christine Essel. Essel is a former member of the Airport Commission and former chairwoman of the Community Redevelopment Agency.