Project Area Committees Fight Over Future : Development: Members of obscure panels are often at rancorous odds as they reshape urban neighborhoods.

“People like you are rabble-rousers!” the chairwoman yelled.

“You’re breaking the law!” a man in the audience shouted back.

The North Hollywood Project Area Committee--an elected body responsible for guiding redevelopment--was in uproar. Two members abruptly stalked out, shattering the quorum. Activist Scott Halper, who was filming the proceedings, approached the dais only to have his camera violently swatted to the floor. His videotape ends with a woman’s scream.

All in all, it was a dismal evening for democracy--but not such a startling scene among project area committees, or PACs, the obscure citizens panels that are reshaping California’s troubled urban neighborhoods.

Far from spacious meeting halls and TV news crews, the often-rancorous, unpaid committees wield formidable power. They speak for divergent community factions at the treacherous vortex of change. Nearly anonymous--and not to be confused with better-known political action committees--PACs nonetheless hold veto rights over redevelopment and oversee every step in its arduous birth. Like few other citizens groups, they strongly influence how cities and agencies spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

PACs exist by state mandate wherever redevelopment raises the threat of housing condemnation. In California, where more than 600 communities are now being overhauled at a cost of $900 million a year, PACs operate in virtually every densely populated community. Usually they convene in living rooms and rented churches, bringing amateur politics and town-hall theatrics to a daunting task. In the Southland, they have been a source of controversy in cities stretching from Anaheim to North Hollywood.

The typical redevelopment plan bulges with 100 pages of sweeping guidelines and abstruse zoning regulations, sewn together with legal clauses and loopholes and augmented by as many as 1,000 pages of environmental reports and demographic studies. Each is a blueprint for decades of growth. Each is crafted during tedious months, sometimes years, by teams of consultants, civic planners, lawyers--and PAC members.

The players are people such as the corner travel agent, the Neighborhood Watch captain, the apartment renter who once took an architecture course. They might recommend allowing property condemnation in neighborhoods south of a major boulevard but not to the north. Or they might call for shorter buildings in one commercial zone and taller ones in another. Their clout, their lust for economic opportunity and their deep fear of condemnation create a volatile mix of self-interest.

Elected homeowners fret incessantly over the motives of colleagues who represent land-hungry developer interests. The PAC plays a Jekyll-and-Hyde role as both adviser and watchdog to other government bodies, including growth-hungry redevelopment agencies. Both roles are considered vital, but it becomes nearly impossible to install a thoroughly neutral panel.

Time and again, PACs have become the focal points of lawsuits, power struggles and bitter charges of collusion. More than a few meetings have been punctuated by pounding fists and shouting matches. Feuds develop over issues large and small--from the zoning of entire commercial strips to the height of a chain-link fence in an alley.

In North Hollywood this year, furor over PAC elections was so intense that one vote was canceled moments before it was to take place; in another, convoluted rules adopted by the PAC enabled a candidate named Greg Roberts to run unopposed in a category reserved for renters--and still lose.

The seat remains vacant.

“A farce,” one activist said angrily.

In Watts, meanwhile, hundreds of protesters with signs marched prior to a scheduled PAC election in August, forcing its postponement. Homeowners there, fearful of condemnation in a proposed super-project affecting 100,000 residents, see the creation of a PAC as an inevitable step toward redevelopment.

That battle goes on, with two PACs now involved--one appointed, one to be created soon in an election. All the while, homeowners are organizing opposition.

In Hollywood, site of one of the most ambitious redevelopment attempts in Southern California, the story has been worse. The ill-fated PAC there was officially abolished last year by frustrated Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo, who termed it a “forum for wacky behavior.” More than most, perhaps, the Hollywood PAC became a classic example of what--and how much--can go wrong.

Created by a neighborhood election in 1983, the 25-member cadre was the guiding force in Los Angeles’ second-largest redevelopment area: the 1,100-acre core of the movie capital--home to Mann’s Chinese Theater, Hollywood and Vine and 37,000 residents. The PAC toiled years to help draft the $922-million plan, adopted by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and the City Council in 1986, and then became a review board for individual projects contemplated within the community.

From the start, however, turmoil reigned. Neighborhood groups blasted the CRA for accepting $150,000 in loans and contributions from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to start the project, only to turn around and create a committee made up of more business seats than resident seats.

At one point, 13 of the 25 posts were held by chamber members who controlled every key subcommittee. CRA officials denied any improprieties, saying the movie-industry presence justified the additional business seats, but a political tug-of-war was touched off that lasted years.

PAC meetings became acrimonious battlegrounds. Leonard Shapiro, publisher of the monthly L.A. Observer, tried to address the committee at one public meeting and was ordered to shut up or leave. As hotter heads prevailed, Shapiro was escorted away by a sergeant-at-arms.

“Everybody in the audience started to yell,” he remembered. “When I left, they all jumped up and went out with me . . . 50 to 75 people. So the meeting broke up.”

Homeowners accused the committee majority of voting along with chamber President Bill Welsh--a suspicion that Welsh and other PAC members denied. But to make sure, homeowners began demanding roll-call votes--in alphabetical order. “(Welsh) was at the end of the alphabet,” activist Brad Berlin recalled with a laugh.

After several disputed elections and a failed lawsuit against the CRA, zealous homeowners finally wrested control of the committee. According to councilman Woo, the PAC then became an immovable roadblock, taking fanatical positions and waging endless debates over parliamentary procedures.

Woo abolished the committee under a state law allowing PACs to dissolve three years after a plan is adopted, and he appointed a less-powerful advisory committee to take its place.

The PAC, however, filed a lawsuit arguing that Hollywood’s plan is written to guarantee the continued existence of the PAC. With a final decision still pending, the committee has gone on meeting for well over a year, raising issues, blasting proposed projects, taking actions that--for the moment, at least--go nowhere.

“A headache,” Woo concluded, “that won’t go away.”

Other cities have gone through similar battles.

Anaheim killed its entire redevelopment plan in 1987 after thousands of residents protested the configuration of the project area--bordering Disneyland--and the political makeup of the PAC, saying it was illegally appointed.

Residents in South El Monte filed suit after the city started two redevelopment projects without bothering to establish committees. That suit was settled in June and PAC elections are scheduled early next year.

“There’s a lot of conflict all over the state,” said attorney Christopher A. Sutton, a redevelopment specialist who waged legal battles, large and small, throughout Southern California.

La Puente, for example, is now bickering over $250 in reimbursements owed to an elected PAC secretary for photocopying expenses, Sutton said.

“Let’s say they short-change her $15,” Sutton said. “The amount of bad blood and ill will that it’s going to buy you is something you can probably count in the millions of dollars.”

Of further debate there, the attorney added, is a proposal to charge the PAC 25 cents per page for photocopies made at City Hall--when the cost to the public is a dime. “The PAC wants to go out to Kinkos and do it at 5 cents a page,” Sutton said. “The city has not said no, but it has not said yes.”

In more typical instances, Sutton said, disputes tend to center on the balance of power. The state laws that mandated PACs in 1972, and gave them veto powers in 1976, calls for them to be independent review committees. But the laws do not tell cities and agencies how to create and assist the groups of novice planners without exerting undue influence.

Despite the importance of PAC elections, the turnout is often so small that 10 or 15 votes is enough for victory. Critics usually question whether pro-growth agencies have done enough to publicize the vote.

A few cities, such as Pasadena and Long Beach, are considered successful examples of how the process should work--creating model urban communities with PACs that function effectively and independently.

Downey failed miserably in its first attempt to start a PAC, appointing one that drew angry charges of political cronyism. The PAC and the city’s redevelopment plan were thrown out by the courts--and the city started over. It advertised widely and summoned residents to a meeting. Downey officials told them a PAC was being formed, explained how it should work, and walked out.

“It was a screwball way of doing it,” former Community Development Director James Cutts remembered. “But some guy in the audience got up, said, ‘We can’t sit here all night,’ and ran the election. I’ve go to say, it worked out pretty well.”