Squall at City Hall : Controversy: From humble beginnings, James Wood has ascended as a mover and shaper of Los Angeles. Some think he has done enough.

Way back in 1967, Sacramento college student James Wood helped organize a mass protest against the higher education policies of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Wood recalls with pride that many thousands turned out at the state capital on a February day and that he--son of a telephone operator and a part-time telephone worker himself--shared the spotlight with Jesse Unruh, the late, legendary California Democrat and Reagan opponent.

“My first public speech was to about 18,000 people,” he says of the protest against Reagan’s proposed budget cuts and tuition proposals for state universities.

It also was the first step in a career of political insurgency that led Wood to Los Angeles and a series of union-sponsored voter registration drives aimed at minorities and the poor. Early on he backed winners in local elections, including Tom Bradley.

Twenty years later, Wood, 45, is a mover and shaker in Los Angeles, comfortable and influential in powerful political circles. Obviously, he has ascended a long way from a peripatetic boyhood marked by his father’s abandonment of the family in the 1950s.

In fact, Wood has climbed far enough from his adolescence in California’s Central Valley to land in a very public hot seat, accused of being a member of an Establishment that is insensitive to the needs of the poor and callous about the overall quality of life in Southern California. Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council will vote on whether to confirm Mayor Bradley’s reappointment of Wood as chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency, a part-time job that pays him $50 per meeting but includes oversight of a $500-million annual budget. Wood’s full-time employment is as assistant secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the AFL-CIO central labor council for the county with affiliated unions claiming a combined membership of 650,000.

Though he has largely remained in the background, Wood has for much of the last decade helped shape contemporary Los Angeles, particularly its burgeoning downtown. He has done this as the hands-on chairman of the CRA, the body that has overseen and promoted the eruption of the city’s contemporary skyline. The agency is credited with stimulating, through grants, loans and other methods, about $5 billion in new construction downtown in the last decade. Some believe the agency has gone too far in developing “a dense urban core” at the expense of other public needs, such as low-income housing.

Last week a City Council committee voted 2 to 1 that Wood not be reappointed to the CRA where he has been chairman continuously since 1984, after stints as chairman in 1981 and 1982.

“Jim Wood is a developer in union official’s garb,” said Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky in an interview. “Jim doesn’t just want downtown densified, he wants the whole damn city densified.” In addition to downtown, Yaroslavsky cited Westwood and the Wilshire Boulevard area as other examples of overdevelopment.

Yaroslavsky was joined by Councilwoman Gloria Molina in voting against Wood’s confirmation.

While even his detractors expect Wood to be reconfirmed by the full 15-member council, the vote highlighted Wood’s potential for controversy. Over the years he has been a target of activists for the homeless, developers and politicians. Furthermore, the battle over Wood may presage acrimonious political disputes to come about the CRA and the shape of future development, downtown and throughout the city.

Wood argues that the CRA has been fulfilling a mandate voted by the City Council in 1977 to revitalize downtown. The vote on his reappointment will be made strictly on how the City Council views the CRA’s role in downtown redevelopment, he said.

“I am operating within the authority granted by a majority of the council . . . ,” he asserted. “The plan called for us to build the city that we’re building. . . . Had we not done that, in my judgment we would have been abandoning our public trust. . . . He (Yaroslavsky) voted for that plan. He approved it.”

Yaroslavksy agreed that he had voted for the plan 13 years ago. But he said downtown redevelopment has gone far enough, noting that plans call for more than doubling downtown office space in the future.

“They’ve done their job at the agency,” Yaroslavsky said. “They ought to declare victory and go on to the next war.” He said that he wants CRA attention shifted to more direct intervention in areas such as drug rehabilitation and housing for poor families, rather than temporary shelters.

The CRA’s backers, including the mayor’s office, have said that in recent months the CRA has shifted its focus from downtown high-rises to creating low-income housing and other programs targeted for the needy.

But despite what his critics say, Wood doesn’t believe he has abandoned his roots.

“I find the buildings downtown to be absolutely beautiful,” he said in an interview at his office near downtown. “I am thrilled when I come in on the Santa Monica Freeway in the morning and you have the snow-covered mountains in the background and those wonderful buildings. I do not see them as a blight. . . . I guess it comes from being in the union movement; I see those as signs of opportunity and progress and prosperity. People are working in them at better jobs than they used to be working. They have life possibilities that are different than they would have been if Los Angeles were going the other direction.”

Wood held forth in an office studded with mementoes of his political activities on behalf of organized labor. The souvenirs bespoke loyalty to politicians who have supported the union movement--notably the prominent pictures of Democrats Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, both losers to Wood’s old nemesis Ronald Reagan.

Wood is tall, slim and has a preference for cowboy boots. His pride about his past is matched by pride about the present. His wife Janice is a union member, too, he said, noting that she is president of the Communications Workers of America local where he is a member. They have no children, he said, adding, “We have careers.”

He labeled Yaroslavsky’s attacks as “political rhetoric, nothing more.”

He also argued that Yaroslavsky is using him as a scapegoat for problems such as traffic congestion, which have stemmed from development, including construction of the Metro Rail subway.

“I think what he’s doing is taking an issue that is visceral and he’s focusing people’s attention on it and then finding the guilty party,” Wood said. “We have things in place that are going to make Los Angeles even better but they’re not built overnight. So Councilman Yaroslavsky, who knows this is true, who knows you don’t build systems overnight, is taking advantage of the current situation.”

There is a freeway of irony connecting the bitterness between Wood and Yaroslavsky.

About the time that Wood came to Los Angeles to register young disenfranchised voters, he met another young political activist. They shared similar views and walked the same picket line at least once in a protest against anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

Both were destined to rise in the public affairs hierarchies of Los Angeles. Both were liberals.

But in the mid-1980s something happened to drive them apart. Yaroslavsky believes it was then that people such as he and Wood had to make decisions about what kind of future they wanted for Los Angeles--how much growth, what kind of growth.

On Tuesday the former allies will see where they stand.

But they both say that their debate has been an argument about how the system should work, not whether the system is viable and valid.

“It’s nothing personal, it’s all policy,” said Yaroslavsky.

If he should lose, Wood acknowledged that he “would be disappointed.” But he added, “I support the process though and I think the process is a good one. . . . I’m not suicidal so this would not be the end of my career or my interest in Los Angeles.”