O.C. Delegation Supports Cox’s L.A. Relief Plan

As Congress heads for a showdown over conflicting big-ticket relief packages for riot-torn Los Angeles and other American cities, Orange County representatives are taking a controversial stand against spending hundreds of millions of new dollars on urban problems.

Instead, the conservative delegation is rallying behind legislation proposed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) that would eliminate for five years virtually all business taxes, including income and payroll levies, in the most devastated parts of the nation’s second-largest city. But the program would stop at the Los Angeles city line.

“The best you can expect from pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the inner city is simply rebuilding the status quo of what was, and that’s not good enough,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who opposes more money for urban social programs but strongly supports the Cox plan.

Earlier this week, President Bush proposed legislation to create so-called urban “enterprise zones” in cities throughout the country. The tax advantages offered under the Bush plan are less generous than those proposed by Cox, but because the Bush proposal could include any major city that meets standards for unemployment and poverty, its cost has been estimated as high as $2.3 billion. The Los Angeles-specific Cox plan carries no official price tag.

The House last month passed a $495-million package of emergency loans and disaster relief targeted largely at Los Angeles and Chicago, a plan strongly opposed by Orange County congressmen. The Senate added $1.5 billion to the House legislation to pay for summer jobs and school and neighborhood programs.

Negotiators for the House and Senate are expected to hammer out a compromise sometime this month; it must then be approved by each branch of Congress. The Cox and Bush tax incentive plans, as well as other proposals for inner-city aid, are to be considered separately.

Critics suggest that Cox and other conservatives, many of whom represent suburban districts whose residents fled troubled cities years ago, are part of a club of suburban Republicans that has long neglected the troubles of urban America.

The Republican notion that federal social programs just don’t work in inner cities “is an ideological answer in search of a premise,” said Bob Brauer, special counsel to Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley), one of the most liberal members of the House and a strong supporter of aid for the cities.

Tax incentives for businesses are fine, said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who represents the heart of the riot-stricken area, but Congress must do much more--creating paid job-training programs, for example--if it is to address the problems that spawned the riots.

“I’m going to fight very hard to keep an enterprise zone from being a conservative-constructed vehicle by which you help business . . . (but) don’t do anything for the people,” Waters said.

Cox and his supporters insist that enterprise zones and other conservative proposals would do more in a few years to revitalize decaying urban centers and the people who live there than a host of federal social programs has accomplished in the nearly 30 years since Watts erupted in flames.

“The question ought not to be whether we care. . . . It ought not to be whether we’re prepared to go in and prove it, fix it up and offer people opportunities. It ought to be ‘How do we do it?’ ” Cox said.

“If all you want to do is redistribute wealth, we can do that for a time until we run out. The task, however, should be creating wealth,” the congressman added. The answer, he said, is passage of his “turbo” enterprise-zone legislation.

Under the Cox legislation, Los Angeles city officials would define the enterprise zone by “green lining” the areas hardest hit by the riots. Within that zone, the Cox plan would eliminate all federal taxes on businesses. It would not become effective unless the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California eliminated their own taxes on business sales, property and income. No business would be eligible for the tax benefits unless 90% of its employees lived within the zone.

Among the original co-sponsors of the Cox bill is Rep. Craig Washington (D-Tex.), an outspoken liberal.

“By offering such striking incentives for capital to locate within the turbo enterprise zone . . . we can realistically expect that enormous economic activity will occur in this area within the five-year period,” Cox wrote in a letter to his House colleagues.

Cox and Rohrabacher were among the three members of the conservative Orange County congressional delegation who voted against the relief package for Los Angeles and Chicago, which was hit by a devastating downtown flood. It passed the House on May 14 by a much narrower margin than expected.

Also voting against the package was Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who said: “It was the toughest vote I’ve ever cast here, but it was the right vote. I’m not just going to throw money at this problem because I watched us throw money at Watts.”

Although they missed the vote, Reps. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) and Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), who represents southern Orange County, said later that they also oppose the aid plan.

“I know it can be perceived as being insensitive . . . but I don’t believe the solution is to simply pour money into a broken system,” Packard said.

Dannemeyer, one of the most conservative members of Congress, said: “When you look at the funding of the welfare state that has been going on continuously since I’ve been here (in Congress), I’m not aware that we’ve neglected anything.”

Defeated Tuesday in his bid for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by former Anaheim mayor and state senator John Seymour, Dannemeyer is the only member of the Orange County delegation who has expressed support for the verdict acquitting four police officers of charges in the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King. That verdict, handed down April 29, was the spark that touched off the Los Angeles riots.

Despite the dissent of the Orange County delegation, the House approved the $494.7-million aid package by a vote of 244 to 162. The measure provided an additional $300 million for the Federal Emergency Management Agency for emergency disaster aid, $169.7 million for the Small Business Administration to cover the costs of making $500 million in SBA disaster loans, and $25 million for additional administrative expenses for the SBA.

When the Senate took up the plan on May 21, it voted 61 to 36 to add $1.45 billion to the package to support programs for summer jobs, Head Start and neighborhood action programs. A House-Senate conference committee is expected to submit a compromise to both houses of Congress within the next few weeks.

The Senate spending plan did not sit well with conservatives, who in overwhelming numbers voted against the much more modest House proposal.

“If I believed that increasing the federal deficit by the better part of a billion dollars . . . was the way to improve our inner cities, then not only would I have voted for it, I would have voted to double it,” Cox said.

“In the end, you are faced with the fact that you can’t spend yourself rich.”