CRA to Seek Key Charter Changes for Project Area

A gavel-pounding contest in April, a City Hall-led coup in June and a combative groundbreaking ceremony in October: Such were the hallmark events of 1992 for the North Hollywood Redevelopment Project.

For all its tumult, 1992 may become best known as a warm-up bout for a 1993 title-fight debate about the future of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency’s operations in North Hollywood.

In 1993, the CRA will seek an amendment to its operating charter that would allow it to capture as much as $400 million in additional tax money generated by North Hollywood property over 12 years. Such funds would pay for new revitalization efforts by the agency.

To date, the crown jewel of the agency’s efforts in North Hollywood has been the gleaming Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences plaza.

Also, via the amendment, the agency would try to regain its now-elapsed power to condemn property, a key tool in the agency’s 12-year effort to reinvigorate the economic life of a 740-acre swath of North Hollywood.

“Getting the amendment approved by the City Council will be the big thing for us in the new year,” said Jerry Belcher, head of the CRA’s North Hollywood program.

Without the amendment, the agency’s North Hollywood efforts could only limp along for another few years before running out of money and steam. There’s no deadline for renewing the amendment, but agency officials hope to do so as soon as possible.

Playing a pivotal role in the 1993 debate will be the local Project Area Committee, a citizens advisory group that has had a colorful and volatile history. In 1992, supporters and critics fiercely jockeyed for control of the committee, which must vote on whether to renew the agency’s North Hollywood mandate before the City Council takes up the issue.

If the committee were to vote against renewal, it would be embarrassing and complicating. To contradict the advice of its locally elected citizens group would require both extra council chutzpah and votes--specifically, a two-thirds vote to override.

The year 1992 began with new members being elected to the committee and the seizure of that body’s presidency--long held by agency confidantes--by Mildred Weller, a CRA critic and head of a North Hollywood-based marketing company.

“The project is a failure,” Weller has said. “We’ve got some pretty buildings, but no one occupies them.” The tax money diverted to the CRA could be better used, Weller has argued, to beef up municipal services, including the police force.

With Weller’s leadership came fireworks, including a chaotic gavel-pounding contest between her and Renee Weitzer, a deputy to Los Angeles City Council President John Ferraro, as both tried to take command of one uproarious committee meeting.

Outshouted and outmaneuvered, the redevelopment agency’s friends on the Project Area Committee staged a walkout and took their protests to Ferraro, who represents the area.

By June, Ferraro persuaded the City Council to disband the committee, a move required, he said, because the group had been questionably elected. But the peremptorily displaced critics charged that Ferraro, an agency supporter, undid their electioneering work to bring back “a rubber-stamp PAC.”

In October, the year’s second committee election, costing more than $25,000, was held under the watchful tutelage of the League of Women Voters.

Only days before the voting, CRA officials and Ferraro broke ground for the long-awaited Ralphs supermarket/shopping mall complex at Magnolia and Vineland boulevards, an event that boosted the spirits of pro-CRA forces by demonstrating the agency’s power to revitalize the area. But the event was also marred by picketing critics of the agency.

Belcher later called the supermarket groundbreaking the 1992 high point for the project. Running a close second, in his estimation, was the October committee election, at which a pro-CRA slate appeared to win a slim majority of seats.

“The PAC was our albatross all year long, but I think we’ve now overcome it,” Belcher said recently.

But Weller is not so sure. “Mr. Belcher may be whistling Dixie,” she said. “I think it remains to be seen if the new board is really controlled by the CRA.”

The matter is not entirely free from doubt because the committee has not met since the October election.

The first real test of strength will occur Jan. 12, when the Project Area Committee meets to elect a new president.

Meanwhile, the North Hollywood Redevelopment Project might become entangled in wider municipal debates in 1993.

The redevelopment area has long been slated for a subway station connecting the Hollywood-downtown Metro Rail line to an east-west Valley subway that would run west along Chandler Boulevard.

Not surprisingly, the CRA has counted on a mass-transit link to help it revitalize North Hollywood as a commercial center.

But the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s recent show of support for a controversial elevated rail system along the Ventura Freeway--connecting to the Metro Rail system at Universal City, not North Hollywood--could mean that North Hollywood would be bypassed by mass transit.

“Possibly the LACTC might start thinking about why Metro Rail should go to North Hollywood if they went with the monorail,” Belcher acknowledged. In effect, if the link between Metro Rail and the Valley line were at Universal City, extending Metro Rail to North Hollywood might seem superfluous, he said.

Although Belcher is hopeful that mass transit will come to the project, the prospect of losing it is another worry for the head of the city’s North Hollywood Redevelopment Project in the new year.