Council Members Assail CRA Budget Report as ‘Misleading’ : City Hall: Taking their first hard look at the agency’s massive and complex expenditures, some on the panel don’t like what they see.

Struggling to make sense of a 350-page document, City Council members on Monday criticized the Community Redevelopment Agency for producing a budget they called “misleading” and “suspicious.”

“It’s like an Easter egg hunt,” Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said. “You’ve got to be a Harvard research assistant to try to figure out what’s going on.”

Yaroslavsky and Councilwoman Gloria Molina professed exasperation Monday during a committee meeting scheduled to take the first hard look at the CRA’s expenditures since the council voted itself greater control over the agency last June.

“Believe me, this is the last you’ve seen of rubber stamps by the City Council,” Molina said.

The document sent to the council describes an annual budget of $582 million and two dozen major projects under way.

But Molina complained that, for example, nowhere in the document could she find money earmarked to pay the Union Rescue Mission $6.5 million to relocate its downtown site, a proposal approved by the council last week at the prodding of the CRA.

“This makes your budget look suspicious,” Molina said. “How am I to know what you are really spending money on?”

Molina called the budget “very misleading” and said: “This document doesn’t tell us the truth.”

Said Yaroslavsky: “It does not give us a true picture of how you’re spending money.”

John Tuite, the CRA’s chief administrator, appeared angered by the criticism and said he was offended at the suggestion that he was attempting to mislead the council. He offered to provide the council with any information it wants, in any form they like.

In a developing controversy over the direction of the CRA, the council voted last June to give itself authority to review the agency’s budgets and work programs before they are approved by the CRA’s commission, appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley. In addition, the council gave itself veto power over CRA decisions and created a new committee to review CRA policy.

The council rejected a proposal sponsored by Yaroslavsky last June to take over the CRA entirely.

“We should have taken the thing over when we had the opportunity,” Yaroslavsky said Monday.

The council’s new review panel, called the Community Redevelopment and Housing Committee, is chaired by Molina, who in recent weeks has become a thorn in the side of the CRA. She voted against the Union Rescue Mission move and has been increasingly vocal in her criticism of the CRA.

Gerry Hertzberg, an aide to Molina, said Monday that the council’s new role in relation to the CRA is “more revolutionary than evolutionary” and said the committee, which is meeting jointly with Yaroslavsky’s Budget and Finance Committee, intends to go over the CRA budget “line by line” and make changes where warranted.

In past years, “nobody knew what was going on” with the CRA budget, Hertzberg said.