Outrage Propels Crusader in War Against Renewal

Fifteen years ago, Sherry Passmore was reborn as a crusader. It happened suddenly, like a religious conversion.

A friend told the young Arcadia housewife about an elderly neighbor whose house was going to be demolished as part of a redevelopment project. “I thought maybe the city needed her house because they were widening her street,” says Passmore. “I didn’t really understand what redevelopment was.”

When she learned that the old woman’s neighborhood had been targeted as the site for a shopping center, Passmore was astounded.

“This was America,” she says now. “Things like that weren’t supposed to happen here. In America, you have the right to live where you want to, without having to move because somebody wants to build a commercial center there.”

Passmore leaped into the battle, meeting with homeowners, schooling herself on redevelopment law, challenging city officials and ultimately helping to save the condemned homes of more than 400 Arcadia residents. That was her baptism by fire.

Impelled by a simmering sense of outrage, Passmore hasn’t stopped since. By now, this tall woman with honey-colored hair and an aristocratic nose has fought development-minded cities from Imperial Beach to Placerville, hounded legislators through the halls of the Capitol in Sacramento and developed a reputation among San Gabriel Valley developers as the hired gun of the slow-growth movement.

“Her main role in life is to harass people,” groused one prominent redevelopment official, asking that his name be withheld.

Passmore, a co-leader of Citizens Action Network, a coalition of about 40 slow-growth groups in Los Angeles and Orange counties, has been a plaintiff in anti-development class action suits, lobbied for legislation to reform redevelopment laws, debated building industry spokesmen in public forums and helped slow-growth groups organize.

But nowadays she seeks to keep a low profile in most of the dozens of community battles she participates in.

Having been through the process so many times, she has a feel for the peculiar psychological spin of a development battle, she says.

“There’s anger, indignation, fear, panic,” says Passmore, who frequently serves as a consultant to beleaguered homeowner groups, often charging a fee to cover expenses. “People say, ‘This really can’t happen, can it?’ ”

Her first task is to convince people that they can resist, she says. “There’s a tendency to say, ‘Why bother? We might as well sell out.’ ”

Then, using expertise on redevelopment that she has acquired from college courses and her numerous battles, she spells out a plan of action, challenging local politicians, making sure that redevelopment agencies meticulously follow the law in condemnation proceedings.

Passmore’s success rate has been high. In the San Gabriel Valley, she has, among many other things:

Led the resistance to large-scale expansion of redevelopment of her hometown of Arcadia.

Helped organize homeowners in Baldwin Park to resist the Sierra Vista redevelopment project (ultimately approved by the voters in a scaled-down version, though the project is being challenged in court).

Served as technical adviser to Rosemead homeowners fighting condemnation of their homes by the Alhambra school district.

Helped put together successful lawsuits challenging designations of blighted areas in South Pasadena and Pasadena.

Now she is working with a group of 21 Temple City homeowners and their neighbors, resisting a possible eminent-domain seizure of their homes to build another retail center on Rosemead Boulevard.

“She’s a shoulder to lean on,” said Roberta Hoffman, one of the Temple City homeowners’ leaders. “She knows what she’s talking about.”

But her opponents say Passmore’s principal weapon is obfuscation.

‘Riles People Up’

One attorney who represents redevelopment agencies complained that she doesn’t understand how the process works and “riles people up.”

An official of a statewide redevelopment organization tells about debating her once: “She started right out by saying, ‘Don’t let these people lead you astray. They’re going to condemn your homes. They tell you they’ll give you market value for them, but that doesn’t mean anything.’ She went on and on.”

But those who oppose redevelopment insist that is exactly what has happened when “blighted” areas were targeted for redevelopment.

“She (Passmore) has a layman’s expertise,” says Christopher Sutton, a Pasadena lawyer who has represented many homeowner groups. “She understands practical outcomes. Maybe she’s not an expert on the history or the legalities. But she understands how, in these projects, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the middle-class get eliminated.”

Magnet for Jobs

Redevelopment, of course, was designed as a means of attracting jobs, development money and tax revenue to cities and counties strapped for funds. After putting together a community redevelopment agency and designating areas as blighted, a city can issue bonds that can be used to offer below-rate market financing to developers and home buyers.

The catch is that the increased property taxes generated by, say, a new retailing center go to the redevelopment agency, not to the city’s general fund. The city does not reap those benefits until the bonds are paid off, often 20 or 30 years later.

Supporters of redevelopment point to revitalized business districts in cities such as Pasadena and Monrovia as evidence of the success of the process.

But Passmore describes the redevelopment organizations as “gold Cadillac agencies” that provide big payoffs for developers while imposing a questionable debt structure on taxpayers.

“There’s no review of city bond issues by the Securities and Exchange Commission,” she says. “There’s no agency that overlooks these things to find out the extent of the debt being imposed on people.”

There have been reforms of the redevelopment system, some of them pushed by Passmore. For example, state Sen. Joseph Montoya (D-El Monte) sponsored legislation in 1976 requiring redevelopment agencies to issue budgets and giving voters the right to hold a referendum on the creation of redevelopment areas.

Central Role

“She’s a very tough lady,” said Montoya, acknowledging Passmore’s central role in lobbying for the bills, which were eventually signed into law. “She’s been up and down the state to many of the same cities I go to.”

Even those who lead redevelopment agencies acknowledge that there were abuses in the past. Some cities declared farmland or sound residential neighborhoods blighted so that they would qualify for redevelopment. But redevelopment supporters contend that the loopholes in the system are being closed by legislation and court decisions. For example, the Legislature passed a law last year forbidding the seizure of large tracts of vacant rural land.

Passmore and her allies are not convinced, largely because of what they perceive as the continuing abuse of eminent-domain powers. “There’s a big difference between eminent domain for the public interest and eminent domain for private profit,” she says.

‘Professional Group’

Developers and city officials frequently accuse Passmore of being a carpetbagger and a mercenary. For example, Baldwin Park City Councilman Jack B. White, who felt the lash of anti-redevelopment forces last year when he was recalled from the mayor’s post, talks about a “professional group” coming into the city to help dissidents.

“They even brought lawyers,” said White. “Sherry Passmore was the lady who actually came in. To have big people from Arcadia, a city that already has its own redevelopment agency, to try and stop us--I think it’s improper.”

But anti-growth groups contend that they are just as entitled to have consultants as redevelopment agencies. In Huntington Beach last year, Passmore said, the city paid an outside consultant $65,000 to help get a beachfront project approved. Passmore, as a consultant for groups opposing the project, received $1,200 in the winning effort to have the plan scuttled.

“It’s no way to make a living,” says Passmore, who lives largely on a pension from her late husband, an insurance executive who died in 1984. Her three sons grew up stuffing envelopes. “Mostly, I try to make money to cover expenses.”

In person, Passmore doesn’t fit the firebrand mold. As she talks about her activist life, there are smiles and girlish laughter--and, every once in awhile, on the subject of eminent domain or an influential adversary, a crackling frown. “I’ve seen people die of stroke because their homes were threatened,” she says.

Did she ever think as a youngster that she would be wrapped up in a grass-roots movement?

“Are you kidding?” she says, shifting moods. “I wanted to be a rancher’s wife and live in the country.”

She appears most comfortable working directly with middle-class homeowners like herself: plain, unassuming people with stubborn convictions about right and wrong. Meeting last week with leaders of the Temple City group in Michael and Roberta Hoffman’s dining room, Passmore was quietly confident.

Urged to Speak Out

She urged homeowners sitting across a table covered with a lace cloth to swallow their apprehensions and to speak out at a City Council meeting scheduled later that evening.

“I think the game they play is to keep you coming and coming to these meetings,” she said. “They think that older people won’t keep coming out at night.”

But standing up to be counted is a necessity, she told one man who worried about “putting my foot in my mouth” before the council. “Look, you’ve got a chance to address the council on a very important issue,” she said. “If you don’t, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.”

Threats Alleged

Passmore gets a bit shifty-eyed when you ask her too many details about her private life. She says she has been threatened and harassed by builders and city officials. On one occasion, she said, the brake line on her car was sliced, and on another, a city official threatened to have her dropped into the Irwindale gravel pits. “There’s a lot of money involved here,” she says.

Passmore, who is deeply religious, said her faith keeps her going. And that’s part of her appeal, contends Justina Ramirez, a leader in the Baldwin Park homeowners group. “I was fascinated by her Christian ideas,” Ramirez said. “She believes there are God-given rights, God-given laws, that you live by in any city.”

Ramirez says the seemingly shy Passmore somehow conveys a rare strength of conviction. “It’s the strength of someone who knows what she’s talking about,” said Ramirez. “I met Howard Jarvis (the late anti-tax proponent) once. He said, ‘Hey, little lady, it’s going to take 20 years to accomplish one thing sometimes, but hang in there.’ Reminds me a lot of Sherry Passmore.”