He Won’t Give Up Till CRA Backs Down : Government: William Tut Hayes takes his fight with the Community Redevelopment Agency personally.

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. A woman from a Hollywood political action committee traded barbs about the agency’s chief, James Wood, with a man wearing a “CRA Go Away” button.

And near a far wall, William Tut Hayes was quietly getting ready to raise hell.

“I’m going to be at every meeting until the CRA gives me what I want,” said the rail-thin activist, pulling some documents from a portfolio. “I don’t plan on giving up, which is what they want me to do.”

The agency’s agitator nonpareil, Hayes, 54, has waged a celebrated four-year fight with the CRA over money he insists the agency has owed him since it evicted him in 1985 from an apartment in which he was living. The home has since been razed to make way for new development.

CRA officials point out that they have doled out nearly $50,000 in storage and moving fees and direct payments to Hayes. Now, they complain, Hayes is just trying to bilk them.

The debate over the discrepancy has landed both Hayes and Wood behind bars and led to the assignment of a police officer to the agency’s meetings.

On Sept. 15, Judge Lois Anderson-Smaltz found Hayes guilty of disrupting a CRA meeting and slapped him with a highly publicized 155-day jail sentence. The judge suspended the sentence 12 days later, when Mayor Tom Bradley’s office urged the Police Department to assign an officer to monitor the meetings.

While most political gadflies are content with just excoriating government officials during public meetings, Hayes also has picketed the homes of the agency’s commissioners and subpoenaed them for testimony in court hearings.

“The others are simply interested in the CRA activities,” Hayes said of his fellow gadflies. “I’m actually a victim of their activities. That’s why my fight is different.”

Hayes’ pluck has awed his friends.

“He’s not like the rest of us,” said Howard Watt, another CRA opponent. “He gives them hell. He pickets and yells at them. Now, Tut can blink and they’ll arrest him.”

And it has angered his foes.

Since last December, Wood has personally made at least three citizen’s arrests of Hayes for disrupting CRA meetings.

“He’s unreasonable,” said Melanie Lomax, one of four attorneys assigned to Hayes’ case by the CRA. “I’m convinced that you cannot satisfy him. He has to realize other people in those meetings have rights too.”

As a condition of Hayes’ release, Anderson-Smaltz ordered him to stay away from the commissioners’ homes. But Hayes said the restrictions have not hindered his fight for redress.

According to his calculations, the CRA owes him $7,000 for moving expenses and property he lost during the eviction, an undetermined sum in punitive damages, and, more importantly, a place to live.

“I was homeless after they evicted me,” said Hayes, who has lived in a storefront on Central Avenue for the last four years. “That’s not supposed to happen. They are supposed to relocate you. They did not do that for me.”

Hayes, a commercial photographer now collecting disability compensation, said he also lost camera equipment and business.

But CRA officials said they have been “more than fair” with Hayes.

Marc Littman, a CRA spokesman, said the agency paid out $11,592 directly to Hayes. Littman said the CRA also spent more than $35,300 to move and store Hayes’ belongings.

While CRA officials said they don’t know the total cost of their feud with Hayes, Wood conceded that it probably would have been cheaper to give Hayes the money he requested.

“We probably could have saved some money,” he said.

But Wood added that writing Hayes a blank check could have also forced the agency to do likewise for other dissatisfied “relocatees.”

“I cannot make decisions based on threats,” he said. “People will say, ‘Give me what I want or I’ll come down and sit in the board room.’ You can’t run an agency that way.”

In a recent meeting, however, the agency did agree to reconsider Hayes’ request for repayment for camera equipment he said he lost. Also, Littman said, the CRA will reissue Hayes a $1,225 check for moving expenses.

Watts Project

Although redress sparked his fight with the CRA and is still his main gripe, Hayes said he also has heatedly challenged the agency on its highly touted Watts Redevelopment Project.

CRA officials said they expect the project to revitalize more than 1,900 acres of mostly blighted residential, commercial and industrial property.

But Hayes said he thinks the plan will leave many poor blacks homeless.

“They are going to put up residences there that the people of Watts cannot afford,” he said. “The blacks there will suffer.”

In a broader sense, Hayes contends that his fight is not just with the agency but “the system.”

Hayes said he also has picketed appearances by former President Ronald Reagan and Bradley, the latter for giving the key to the city to South African government leaders.

“I’m against the status quo,” he said, “because what’s good for the system is usually bad for black people. That’s part of the reason why I fight them. These white boys at the CRA think they are so powerful that they can take this little black guy, throw him in jail and hear nothing from him.”

An ideological holdover from the turbulent ‘60s, Hayes said many of his ideas were shaped while he was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a community patrol group.

“I’m a follower of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X,” said Hayes. “I believe in black people doing for themselves and in a separate black state. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-white but pro-black.”

Remembering his days with SNCC, a prominent civil rights group of the 1960s, Hayes recalled helping to draft a secession plan for Watts.

“But for some reason all the white city officials seemed in favor of it,” he said, chuckling. “We knew right then if they liked it, there must be something wrong with it; so we dropped that idea fast.”

Hayes acknowledges that over the years his activism got him in trouble. He said he was arrested 57 times in one year during the ‘60s.

In total, he said, he has been arrested well over 200 times, mostly for his protests. But the Sept. 15 conviction was his first.

“There was a time when it seemed like I would get arrested just for walking to my door,” he said.

So far this year, Hayes has been placed on probation for disrupting one CRA meeting and has another disruption case pending.

In the latter case, Hayes and Howard Watt were arrested by Wood on May 17 for heckling CRA commissioners and throwing an audio cassette tape at one. Transcripts of the meeting show Watt openly challenging Wood while Hayes is quoted only as saying, “There’s (a microphone) on the table.”

However, charges against Watt, who is white, were dropped. This led the CRA’s other resident gadflies to accuse Wood of racism.

Insisting that he was not racist, Wood said the city filed the charges--not the CRA.

“I know this is not a racial issue,” he said.

In the trial after the May 17 arrest, Hayes subpoenaed five of the commissioners for testimony, but they failed to appear. Bench warrants were issued, and Wood and Commissioner Daniel Horwitz were jailed for two hours.

“The only reason they were (in jail) was because they misunderstood the order,” said Lomax, the CRA attorney. “They did not intentionally violate the law.”

Hayes said the commissioners had underestimated his ability to use the law to his advantage.

“A big mistake,” he said. “They aren’t too intelligent. If they were, they would just give me my money and leave me alone.”