CALIFORNIA PORTFOLIO : Rebuild Rebuild L.A. to Revitalize the City

After six months of hope and hype, Rebuild L.A. is teetering on the brink of failure.

That’s the emerging, though mostly whispered, consensus in board rooms, City Council chambers and on the street. Overstatements of private-sector commitments to the inner city and Rebuild’s seemingly cavalier attitude toward public accountability are just two recent examples of the organizations’s failure to craft even short-range solutions to the city’s problems. With its jumble of committees, Rebuild is regarded by many community activists as more an uncoordinated shadow government, providing cover for politicians and opportunistic corporate donors, than an effective extra-governmental agency.

Rebuild’s ineffectiveness, however, should not be surprising. Initially, Peter V. Ueberroth was asked to persuade the private sector to help riot-torn areas. That mandate quickly expanded to reconstruction of the entire metropolis. In multiracial, fragmented Los Angeles, such a task would have been daunting for even the most sensitive leader. But the imperious Ueberroth, and his like-minded inner circle, disliked strategies of inclusion or the hard work of learning the realities of a rapidly transforming city.

Signs of trouble first surfaced when Ueberroth, in a highly publicized speech, suggested that many burnt-out businesses were “not of any great, huge value” and that some of the city’s community leaders would simply do best to “get out of the way” of the rebuilding bandwagon. Such sentiments showcase his insensitivity, because most of the owners of these businesses are minorities. So far, few have received Rebuild assistance.

Equally troubling, Rebuild has excused the city’s political Establishment from developing even a semblance of positive economic leadership under the pretense that only “private-sector” action can work. The private sector may be the key to reviving the economy, but this does not obviate the need for strong public-sector leadership in making Los Angeles a more attractive place to locate and grow businesses. In fact, some of the most powerful corporate leaders on Rebuild’s 80-member board are being wooed, and sometimes lured, by private-public partnerships led by mayors, governors and other elected officials of other regions.

Rebuild’s business-development task force is also burdened with participants like Cleveland import Gary Conley, head of the L.A. County Economic Development Corporation. His most recent accomplishment was to provide the lead quote and misleading statistics for a front-page Boston Globe article suggesting that Southern California was in a “nose-dive.” His chief economist, Jack A. Kyser, who three years ago, as a Chamber of Commerce employee, could say nothing bad about Los Angeles, now feeds the all-too-eager media with “predictions” that our region may not recover until the mid- to late ‘90s.

Even prominent Rebuild board members seem unable to resist jabbing away at the city they have promised to revive. Disney’s Michael Eisner, a few days before he cashed in most of his multimillion-dollar salary package made possible, in large part, by the creative energies hired and gate receipts generated in Southern California, denounced the region as a “third world nation.” Another, even more accomplished Southern California-basher is Hughes Aircraft’s recently transplanted president, Michael Armstrong. He has been lavishly praised for his “commitment” to spend $18 million in the riot area, though the money will essentially buy minority defense contracts that Hughes likely would have let in any event. That “gift,” however, hardly compensates for the thousands of local job losses he has signed off on, like his company’s decision to shift much of its missile division from Canoga Park to Tucson, Ariz.

If Rebuild L.A. is going to revitalize the region, and especially economically neglected areas, it will have to overcome these self-defeating tendencies. Instead, it must assemble a core of business and political leaders committed to L.A.’s future. Four reforms can help:

--Narrow Rebuild’s mission to attracting large corporate investors to the region. Rebuild should establish a fixed dollar amount--say, $5 billion in new funds that would otherwise not come to Los Angeles invested in depressed regions such as Pico-Union and South-Central by 1996--as a goal. This is where Rebuild’s leadership skills would be most welcome and effective.

--Develop or support the development of a regional promotion campaign aimed at reviving the most depressed parts of the city.

--Eliminate the myriad Rebuild subcommittees and task forces. Important concerns such as education, health care and small-business development are better pursued by dedicated public and non-profit entities, and newer, ad hoc local groups.

--Drastically reduce the board to include only members with the economic expertise and regional commitment that can induce larger companies to come to the city.

Without such a renewal and narrowing of its mission, Rebuild L.A. will likely become less and less a symbol of the city’s renewal than of its apparent inability to heal itself. Neither Los Angeles nor those like Ueberroth who have given so much in a basically well-intentioned effort, deserve such a fate.