Election to Be a Key Battle in Bitter Redevelopment Fight : North Hollywood: Voters will select a committee advising Los Angeles leaders on a major 740-acre project.

North Hollywood is at a crossroads, with a key battle over the destiny of its 740-acre redevelopment project set to occur at an election Tuesday. On this Guy Weddington McCreary and Mildred Weller concur.

“It’s one of the most important elections in North Hollywood’s history,” said McCreary, scion of a family that once owned much of the area.

As important as the presidential contest? “Absolutely, for us,” said Weller, owner of a North Hollywood-based marketing firm.

That, however, is about all they agree on.

McCreary is an ardent champion of the North Hollywood Redevelopment Project while Weller is a tenacious critic of the 13-year effort to use the powerful tools of redevelopment to revitalize one of the San Fernando Valley’s oldest communities.

The clash between these two and their ideologies will reach a climax Tuesday night when some 12,000 eligible voters are invited to meet at St. David’s Episcopal Church to pick 25 local residents and property owners to sit on the Project Area Committee, commonly called the PAC.

Two slates of candidates--one pro-redevelopment, the other anti-redevelopment--are running for the PAC seats.

The two sides have fought fiercely to control the PAC for more than a year. Committee meetings have been marked by scuffling matches, walk-outs and complaints of electoral chicanery, prompting the City Council to dissolve one PAC and set Tuesday’s election to start fresh.

Once elected, the PAC will advise city officials as they chart a future for the North Hollywood project, the only venture of its kind in the Valley by the city’s powerful Community Redevelopment Agency.

The agency’s trophy North Hollywood development is the pinkish, mid-rise office complex at Lankershim and Magnolia boulevards, home to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and other entertainment-industry tenants.

Last week, after years of frustrating delays, the CRA held a ground-breaking ceremony--picketed by agency critics--for a future Ralphs supermarket at Vineland Avenue and Magnolia. The Academy complex, which is still incomplete, got a $15-million subsidy from the CRA while the Ralphs project got a $3-million subsidy. Additionally, the land for both projects was assembled by the CRA using its power of eminent domain to buy the property of unwilling owners.

But the agency’s redevelopment powers are now in jeopardy: Its eminent domain powers in North Hollywood have expired and it has nearly exhausted $89 million in property taxes it had been authorized to spend to revitalize the area.

In short, if it is to continue, the North Hollywood project needs a new lease on life. And that’s just what the CRA is now requesting from the Los Angeles City Council--a new 12-year charter to operate and a renewal of its eminent domain powers.

The biggest question marks are the amount of tax money the agency will seek--and whether the PAC will approve such a plan. This figure is tied to the amount of work the agency envisions, from subsidies and loans, to developers, to expenditures for street improvements.

Jerry Belcher, head of the CRA’s North Hollywood Project, said he expects the agency to seek authority to spend “from $300 million to $400 million.”

But if a majority of the PAC seats in Tuesday’s election are won by members of the 22-member slate led by Weller and other redevelopment critics, obtaining City Council approval for such an expanded charter may be problematic.

Although the PAC’s advice to the council is not binding, it could be influential with that body.

The anti-redevelopment slate’s platform is straightforward.

“We’d really just like the agency to pack its bags and leave our community,” Nancy Litwack said last week, standing behind the counter of her small Magnolia Boulevard store, Survival Books/The Larder, where how-to books on modern knife-fighting and jungle first-aid crowd the shelves.

“This community does not want the CRA’s high-rise development,” Weller said. “The CRA is not here to improve the situation for the existing property owners. What they want is to restructure the whole community and bring in big developers using our tax dollars to subsidize them.”

Others have more personal fears of redevelopment.

“Because of redevelopment, my house is worth $100,000 less than it should be,” Maria Fant said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The CRA says our community is blighted and that by itself depresses values.” As a result, so this logic goes, the agency finds it cheaper to buy properties through eminent domain.

But Diana Liekus, a real estate agent and one of 22 candidates on the pro-redevelopment slate in Tuesday’s election, said the CRA is vital to North Hollywood’s future.

“Is life better in North Hollywood because of CRA? It’s getting better,” she said. “Some say it would’ve gotten better anyway. But I’ve lived here 23 years and until recently it had been going downhill.”

McCreary’s vision of life without the CRA is quite vivid. If a hostile PAC and City Council force the CRA to shut down in North Hollywood, private investors would leave and the area would slide into an urban quagmire.

“We’d be killed in our beds,” he said apocalyptically. “We’d go down, down, down. There’d be gangs and violence.”

In literature mailed to PAC voters, the CRA has stressed its record of assistance to developers of residential projects, perhaps the least controversial of the agency’s activities. It has helped finance nearly 500 new North Hollywood housing units, including the 13-story Magnolia Towers senior citizens apartment project, the agency has reported.

Last week, as a sign of just how closely this fight is being watched in high quarters, CRA administrator Ed Avila sent a “Dear Neighbor” letter to the thousands of eligible PAC voters in North Hollywood.

Avila encouraged voters to participate in the election but did not endorse any candidates. His two-page missive ticked off agency accomplishments in North Hollywood while insisting that the CRA’s work is “not fully realized” and deserves to be continued under a new charter.

Avila also denied charges--reportedly circulated by critics--that the CRA has run roughshod over private-property owners in North Hollywood, forcing them to sell to the agency at below-market prices as it has assembled land for its largest projects.

“The vast majority of these acquisitions were negotiated with the property owners who agreed to the prices paid,” Avila wrote.

Belcher, in an interview, said the CRA has acquired a total of 51 properties in the area through “voluntary escrow” and another 22 after the start-up of condemnation proceedings.

Seeking to debunk the view that redevelopment means bulldozing homes to make way for high-rises, Belcher said the agency has only acquired about a half-dozen single-family homes to make way for its commercial projects.

As for fears that the agency plans to bring in high-rises, it is not so, Belcher said. In fact, the agency’s proposed 12-year program, while a tentative and non-binding document, shows only a modest addition of new office space to the area.

Even so, the anti-CRA forces distrust the agency’s work program and its promises.

Litwack said she is confident that if a major high-rise developer wanted to go into North Hollywood, the agency would scrap its work program in an instant to accommodate.

The prospect of the anti-redevelopment faction gaining control of the PAC is not a happy one for Renee Weitzer, a top aide to Los Angeles City Council President John Ferraro and his liaison to the North Hollywood project.

Ferraro represents North Hollywood and supports the CRA’s request for an expanded mandate to operate. He was the one who urged the City Council to dissolve the PAC in June when it became dominated by anti-redevelopment forces.

Neither Ferraro nor the council would be bound by advice from the PAC, but overriding the PAC’s disapproval of a new agency charter would require a two-thirds vote of the council. Ratifying the PAC’s advice would take only a majority vote.

Still, if the critics win, it would be tough to ignore them, Weitzer said. “It’s hard to say what we’d do if that happened,” she said. “We haven’t really thought about that.”

NEXT STEP

Property owners, residents or business tenants in the North Hollywood redevelopment area may vote in Tuesday’s election for a new Project Area Committee, which advises the city on redevelopment. Voters have been notified of the election by mail. The balloting begins at 7 p.m. at St. David’s Episcopal Church, 11605 Magnolia Blvd. Although the redevelopment area has 12,000 PAC voters, only about 200 have cast ballots in recent elections. Tuesday’s election is being conducted by the League of Women Voters.