Activists Call for Huge Funding Influx : Recovery: Multiracial coalition urges President to withdraw offer of $1 billion in aid to Russia and make an emergency transfer to Los Angeles. Nationwide education, welfare reforms are proposed.

A multiracial coalition of community activists, in a lengthy assessment of post-riot Los Angeles issued Tuesday, said that massive public investment is needed to reconstruct the low-income communities ravaged by last year’s civil disturbances.

The activists call for a major expansion of social welfare spending, an environmentally driven job development strategy and vastly expanded enforcement of minimum wage laws to specifically aid the thousands of low-wage immigrant workers in the region. The study’s proposals on urban transportation, community development and public health also give primacy to the needs of low-income people.

The report, released at a mid-Wilshire news conference, also urges President Clinton to withdraw his offer of $1 billion in aid to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and instead make an emergency transfer of the funds to Los Angeles, which is facing a $500-million budget deficit next year.

“The goal of this document is to build a movement of responsible debate about urban policy in Los Angeles,” said principal author Eric Mann, director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center.

Many people in the community issued “a collective sigh of relief” when calm prevailed after two Los Angeles police officers were convicted of violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights, said Joe Hicks, Los Angeles director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization once headed by Martin Luther King Jr. But Hicks stressed that a debate on the city’s future is still urgently needed one year after the massive civil disturbances that resulted in 45 deaths and nearly $1 billion in property damage.

“Little progress has been made on the problem of polarization of the races or the economic struggle,” Hicks said.

The report, titled “Reconstructing Los Angeles From the Bottom Up,” faults Mayor Tom Bradley for ceding responsibility to Rebuild L.A., a private organization it labels as being “unaccountable.” The 58-page study says that Rebuild L.A., whose “purpose was to assess the needs of low-income communities and attract job-creating investment while cutting through government red tape,” has failed to create good, well-paying jobs for inner-city residents.

“The balance sheet registers dashed expectations,” the report says. “Not one major factory is under construction” in South Los Angeles “and the hard and soft pledges involve fewer than 5,000 jobs.”

In turn, President Clinton is faulted for a strategy of wooing the middle class “that virtually abandons the urban centers of our nation.”

Representatives of Bradley and Rebuild L.A. Co-Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth sharply criticized the report. Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani called it a diatribe and said criticism of Bradley’s creation of Rebuild L.A. was particularly misdirected.

“The mayor created RLA to attract private investment to South Los Angeles and that is its mission pure and simple,” Fabiani said. “The mayor has undertaken numerous trips to Washington in the last year seeking increases in federal aid, reformed enterprise zone legislation and summer jobs money.”

Rebuild L.A. spokeswoman Susan Gonzalez called the report’s characterization of the organization’s strategy, goals and accomplishments “completely erroneous.” Rebuild L.A. Co-Chairman Barry Sanders said recently that there has been more than $500 million in new investments and the creation of several thousand new jobs. But there has been no hard accounting on these figures.

The report is the product of nearly a year’s study by more than 50 individuals representing a broad spectrum of social activists and liberal academics. Among those who participated in Tuesday’s news conference were representatives of the Committee for Humane Immigrant Rights, Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, the Mexican-American Political Assn., and Agenda, a police reform organization, as well as professors from UCLA and Cal State Northridge.

Nonetheless, the report criticizes some of the authors’ traditional allies in “progressive social movements” for failing to develop a long-term strategy to deal with urban problems that challenge “corporate prerogatives and power.”

The report also depicts police reforms that grew out of last spring’s unrest and the selection of Willie L. Williams to head the LAPD as inadequate responses to issues of justice and accountability and calls for a freeze on the police budget until there is a “massive increase in social service funding and a marked improvement in police behavior.”

Among the proposals advocated by the report are several that are national in scope, said environmental organizer Kikanza Ramsey.

These measures include a 100% per year increase in the federal education budget, a 100% increase in federal housing expenditures for low-income residents, as well as a $54 billion congressional allocation as “a first step toward a national program of ending poverty through direct income transfers to the poor.” Additionally, eligibility for programs such as aid to families with dependent children should be liberalized, Ramsey said.

Asked how these programs would be funded, the activists responded: Tax increases for corporations and wealthy individuals that exceed the tax breaks they got during the 1980s. Corporations would have contributed $130 billion more per year to the federal Treasury during the 1980s if the tax rates they paid in the 1970s had not been slashed, Mann said, citing a 1992 study by Citizens for Tax Justice.

Other proposals are local in nature, although no less controversial. The report calls for a Los Angeles County minimum wage of $8 an hour, well above the current state minimum wage of $4.25 an hour.

One section of the report echoes studies that were done after the 1965 Watts riots. Low-income residents have to rely on a public transportation system that has the lowest public subsidies of any major city in the country, said Lisa Hoyos Tweten of the Strategy Center. She said transportation policy-makers must pay considerably more attention to the needs of the poor, such as: “How does a janitor making the minimum wage get home after his shift ends at 3 a.m. and many of the bus lines have stopped running?”

A call for “sustainable, environmentally sound economic development” is a key recommendation, said Prof. Cynthia Hamilton, a longtime Los Angeles resident who now heads Rhode Island University’s African-American studies department. For example, the study calls for development of electric cars, prefabricated housing and other “socially useful products” that will not “generate chemicals that poison the air, water or earth.”

Mann and others at the news conference acknowledged that they did not expect their proposals--many of which they acknowledged are controversial--to be adopted soon. Rather, Mann said issuing the report is the first step in “generating a grass-roots movement to rebuild the country, not just L.A., from the bottom up.”