Little Steps Along the Road of a Huge Task

In Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Linda Griego’s office, recovery from the riot is a matter of counting small, even tiny, steps.

Reports arrive each day: Twelve Chevron stations have reopened. So have the Chinese Express, the Sav-on drugs, the Radio Shack and a few other businesses in the 1600 block of East 103rd Street.

Griego, who supervises the city’s recovery efforts, knows this is not enough. Time is too short.

The longer the burned-out hulks of mini-malls, shopping centers and small stores remain, the greater the odds against L.A. coming back. Delay kills hope. With enough delay, vast sections of the city will permanently resemble old Charcoal Alley, the section of Watts left in rubble for more than 15 years after the 1965 riot.

Think of that. Charcoal Alleys from South L.A. to Hollywood, from Fairfax to Pico-Union.

Moreover, the physical reconstruction of burned businesses is only the beginning. The major task, bringing new job-producing businesses to Los Angeles, rests with Peter Ueberroth and his private Rebuild L.A. organization. But that effort has barely gotten started.

Until it does, Griego’s job is comparable to commanding a small brigade of soldiers sent out to hold off the enemy until the heavy duty reinforcements arrive.

Griego was hired by Mayor Tom Bradley last year to bring new businesses to L.A. and persuade old ones to remain. Then, after the riot, Bradley handed her the recovery job.

She is a slender, smartly dressed woman who doesn’t look like she used to climb telephone poles for a living. But that’s what she did, as a Pacific Bell supervisor of installation and service crews in the San Gabriel Valley.

Griego got the job while on the staff of Sen. Alan Cranston. “I was on a labor panel discussion and got into an argument with a guy from AT & T who said government didn’t have the right to tell companies to place women in ‘non-traditional’ jobs,” she said. Two weeks later, the phone company took up her challenge. Pac Bell invited her to be interviewed for the crew chief job.

After three years of high wires, Griego opened a Mexican delicatessen on La Cienega, north of Beverly Boulevard. Later, she and some partners bought an old downtown firehouse, and Griego got a contractor’s license so she could supervise the complex remodeling job. The restaurant is now the successful Engine Co. 28.

As we talked in her City Hall office Wednesday, Griego’s table covered with reports on burned-out businesses, I could see the immensity of her task.

Griego is at her desk at 7 a.m. An hour and a half later, she is on the phone to Washington for her daily conversation with David Kearns, who heads President Bush’s riot recovery task force.

They discuss projects and figure out ways of cutting through bureaucratic obstacles. On Tuesday, for example, she told Kearns about The Times’ story revealing Defense Department plans to abandon a 500-employee Southwest L.A. enlistment center that had been burned. By Wednesday morning, the decision to move the center had been reversed.

As is the case in every disaster, applying for federal loans or grants is frustratingly complicated and time-consuming. Griego has organized teams of volunteers who work with business people applying for disaster relief assistance.

Dealing with bureaucracy is the easy part of Griego’s task. The hard part is trying to lure new businesses to Los Angeles.

At present, the city’s most effective tools are enterprise zones. Los Angeles has five of them, authorized under state law giving state tax breaks for companies that move into low-income, high-unemployment areas. The Bush Administration and some congressional Democrats want the federal government to do the same, but Congress has refused to approve such proposals in the past.

Enterprise zones help, said Griego, but “Los Angeles can’t put all its eggs in that basket.”

I saw what she meant when I talked to a businessman in one of the zones.

Conway Collis owns the California Recycling Co., which takes plastic material from garbage and recycles it. Among the company’s products are bus stop benches, decks for boat docks and furniture.

Collis has hired 20 people in his plant in an East L.A. industrial area. Admittedly, the tax benefits helped persuade him to move. But, he said, “Ultimately it was frosting on the financial cake rather than the cake itself. For us, it was mostly being part of being a good corporate citizen.”

But not all corporations have that attitude. And that makes the job even tougher for Griego and the others trying to rebuild the city.

In an economy still suffering from the recession and with a corporate culture focused on the short-term bottom line, they’ll have to be great persuaders if recovery is to move from small steps to big ones.