Rebuild L.A.’s Kinsey Busy Polishing Agency’s Image : Leadership: Co-chairman seeks to sell inner city to businesses while combatting criticism of RLA’s progress.

Bernard Kinsey drives like a man with no time to waste: fast, anticipating and then skirting even the slightest slow-up. Anyone who wants to follow had better stick close.

But, he says, “when I go into ‘the neighborhood,’ I am more conscious of not breaking any speed laws because I don’t want to be stopped and humiliated. Anybody in the black community feels that way because for so many years it has been that way.”

It’s jarring to hear such words from Kinsey, a man who wears confidence and success as artlessly as his quietly expensive suits and monogram-cuffed shirts. But if he feels out of place in the inner city, where buildings seem held together by iron bars and layers of graffiti and the downtown skyscrapers gleam on the horizon like a mirage, he does not show it.

In fact, Kinsey knows his way around the places of poverty and despair in Los Angeles almost as well as he knows his way around a corporate boardroom. It is this dual experience that has thrust Kinsey into the pivotal task, as Rebuild L.A.’s co-chairman, of bringing these two worlds together.

It is his job, he says, to sell the inner city to businesses--probably the most daunting sales job that the 49-year-old Kinsey, the consummate salesman, has ever taken on. But increasingly, in the face of criticism of RLA and frustration over the progress that Los Angeles has made in filling the needs exposed last spring, Kinsey is spending more of his time selling RLA to the public.

“You read in the press that we have only half a billion in investment committed so far,” he tells an audience. “Only? You can’t name another inner city in this country that in the past year has managed to get $500 million worth of investment.”

With worldwide attention focused on Los Angeles as it heads toward the anniversary of last year’s riots, Kinsey and RLA in recent months have been redoubling their efforts to stay focused on what they see as their mission--to bring private investment and jobs into the inner city.

“It has been unbelievably difficult to take the negative criticism that’s been heaped on us and continue to go after our objectives,” Kinsey says. “But it has made us stronger.”

In their interactions with the public, RLA board members now use a “talking points” paper written by Kinsey. A colorful, professionally developed packet listing RLA’s accomplishments and outlining its structure and goals is now the backbone of the organization’s publicity.

Task forces have been divided into groups, and each chairman oversees those that best match his interest or abilities. The co-chairmen--Kinsey, Peter V. Ueberroth, Barry A. Sanders and Tony Salazar--also are meeting regularly with RLA’s 80 board members, many of whom felt out of touch with the decision makers. And RLA’s staff has doubled in the past six months.

Now Kinsey’s meetings with potential “customers”--those who could bring jobs back to the inner city--are sandwiched between speeches, community appearances and dozens of interviews, instead of the other way around.

“I now spend my time--too much time--battling irresponsible journalism,” he said in a recent speech to the Orange County Forum, holding up a national newsmagazine that portrayed Los Angeles as a hellish city. Every chance he gets, he preaches--and practices--positive thinking about the city and its prism of communities and is especially irritated when reporters don’t.

Daily he deals with what he calls “an expectations gap. . . . People confuse the help we have to give with the help they want.” His litany, repeated innumerable times over the course of a week, is that the mission of RLA is to “get businesses to hire, train and invest” in the riot-affected areas.

His focus on investment and his passionate challenge to businesses to participate drew a standing ovation from the Orange County audience. It was different a few days earlier when he took his message to the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-owned newspaper with offices on South Central Avenue.

“I get real disappointed when I hear you say all we’re here for is to see that everybody else does something,” Kenneth Thomas, chief executive and publisher of the Sentinel, told Kinsey in a frank meeting among Kinsey, Thomas and Sentinel staff members. “I had always looked at, and I think a lot of folks look at, RLA as the organization that was going to cause things to happen. It seems to me that this is kind of bugging out of the responsibility.”

Kinsey quickly replied: “Look, we’re not bugging out. . . . We’ve got over half a billion dollars of committed projects, many of them that have been built in the last 11 months. How can that be bugging out of anything?” he asked, his voice trailing off in exasperation.

Later he said: “People are angry. People are frustrated. I don’t take this personally. . . . We’re all frustrated. But the real question is how do we begin to solve these problems? In our case, with this 50-person volunteer organization, we decided our best expertise was in trying to get businesses to invest in the area.”

In yet another meeting crammed into an incredibly tight schedule, Maria Contreras-Sweet, chairwoman of an RLA committee on human services, asked for the RLA message to hit harder on social concerns and Kinsey told her: “We are hugely concerned” with issues of poverty, education, joblessness, health care and violence in the inner city. “But,” he said, “that is not our focus and we cannot lose our focus.”

For several months after its founding, it seemed that tensions within the organization, and between RLA, minority groups and political leaders, would rub away the veneer of spirited cooperation that enveloped the city’s initial response to the devastation of the riots and the creation of RLA.

Grumblings from minority communities led to the appointment of Kinsey to join Ueberroth and attorney Sanders--both of whom are Anglo--as a co-chairman. Later, Salazar was named the fourth co-chairman in response to requests from the Latino community for greater representation. In the face of dissatisfaction over Rebuild L.A.’s approach to the rebuilding process, it renamed itself RLA to minimize expectations that it was in the bricks-and-mortar business.

But the complaints did not stop. Critics said it was disorganized, that its board was unwieldy, that its non-governmental standing was a crippling flaw and that the Gargantuan, 1,200-member task force structure was a dilution of resources, energy and purpose.

Late last year word got out that Kinsey was a finalist in the search for a director of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Though he says he got cold feet and backed out, the damage had been done--confusing the staff and fueling speculation that Kinsey and Ueberroth were feuding and that Kinsey was bailing out. Although the rumors continue today, Kinsey flatly denies them.

“There have been mistakes made,” Kinsey says, “and we have learned a lot from them.”

Some of RLA’s sharpest critics say little, publicly, against Kinsey. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), the driving force behind Community Build--formed to deal with social aspects of the healing process--says her complaint is with RLA’s “overall idea and approach. It was ill-conceived. It gets in the way of elected officials having to take responsibility for . . . solutions to complicated problems.”

Brenda Shockley, who heads Community Build, says of Kinsey: “My experience with him and his appreciation for community issues has been a very positive one. . . . But it’s not clear to me, from what I have read, that he knew what he was getting into.”

Between interviews, meeting with business representatives and with RLA workers, Kinsey seems to be in all the right places, all the time, delivering the newly focused message about RLA. His honeyed Southern drawl and its cadence subtly shift to fit his audience as Kinsey moves fluidly from a Neighborhood Housing Services rebuilding project in South-Central to a Westwood gathering of bankers, to a formal ceremony for Los Angeles Police Academy graduates.

His voice is already raspy at 9 a.m., but each speech or conversation gets the same powerful dose of intensity. He ruefully mutters that “my calendar is not my own” but will further confound it by stopping to talk to just one more person, consider one more viewpoint or give one more interview.

There isn’t a question he won’t tackle, a questioner who won’t be addressed by name, a conversation held without direct eye contact, or a chance to say hello that is overlooked.

As the day wears on, Kinsey runs later and later for his appointments. And still he hasn’t gotten to his foot-thick stack of mail. “Letters, attacks, requests for me to speak, requests for help,” he recites. “It’s just not all possible . . . and I am pretty good at this. I know how to manage and get things done.”

Often, his wife Shirley asks her husband’s secretary to fax home his schedule so she will know whether to expect him for dinner.

Midnight routinely slips by before he has finished his usual two or three hours of reading, absorbing more numbers and facts, distilling opinions and storing them all in his filing-cabinet memory. If a particular article sparks his interest, he’ll make a note to call the author to ask for a meeting and a chance to kick around some ideas.

“He does not run down,” says George McDaniel, a longtime friend. “I remember times when he would try to kick back, but he couldn’t stay that way for an hour.”

And his wife says he is even busier now than before he joined RLA and was running his own business development and consulting company, KBK Enterprises.

In 20 years with Xerox, which Kinsey left in 1991, he put together a list of credentials that reads like a primer on superlatives: the youngest this, the first that, the best at something else.

“Bernard is a person that 10 minutes after you meet him, you say ‘I’ve found the first black president.’ People see that in him,” says McDaniel.

Though Kinsey says he has shunned attempts to lure him into politics, he has not definitely ruled it out. Indeed, it would seem out of character for him to rule out anything. “I want to do all the mountains, all the rivers,” he says.

Part of what drives him seems to be a conviction that others should have what he has had. Kinsey is by no means bashful about his career accomplishments, but it’s when he is talking about the intangibles of his life that his voice thickens with emotion.

He speaks of growing up in segregated West Palm Beach, Fla. His father, Ulysses, and mother, Christine, met at Florida A&M; University, a historically black college where decades later the younger Kinsey also met his wife--and where his son, Khalil, 16, plans to attend.

As a schoolteacher in the early 1940s, Ulysses Kinsey organized other African-American teachers and hired a young attorney, Thurgood Marshall, when he sued the school district to gain equal pay for black employees. He won. When he retired after 45 years as a teacher and principal, the school was renamed in his honor.

The differential in pay for blacks and whites, the elder Kinsey said in a telephone interview, was “unacceptable to me. When the school board didn’t go the way I thought it should go, I stood up and told them exactly what I thought. I couldn’t worry about where I was going to get my next dollar. . . . I have to be my own man and that’s what I think Bernard is.”

“My father was my hero,” the younger Kinsey says. “I don’t need basketball players as heroes. Kids today need more heroes coming out of their homes rather than out of the TV.”

Kinsey also thinks today’s youths need values, a good education and an opportunity to succeed on their own merits. “When I went to school, they taught us citizenship,” Kinsey says. “I don’t know why we can’t do those things anymore.”

Kinsey went to segregated schools and remains a strong proponent of black colleges and a fund-raiser and generous supporter for the United Negro College Fund and his alma mater. At the same time that he is persuading businesses to offer training opportunities for inner-city youths, he advises the kids to get to college any way they can.

In a sense, he says, attending segregated schools kept him from experiencing racism. “As I grew up, I never knew there was a problem with my blackness,” he recalls. For him, racism became a personal issue in 1965--the summer he was 19--when he and his best friend went to work at the Grand Canyon as park rangers.

“We were the first blacks they had ever had. . . . Our supervisor was a guy from Natchez, Miss. I’ll never forget him. He made our lives miserable in an environment that’s the prettiest in the world. . . . We were punished for just being there.”

But whether it’s driving through the streets of South-Central or doing a summer job in Arizona, Kinsey says, “Racism is like rain. it’s either gathering or falling on you.

“The reality is, it’s there. The question is how to overcome it. That’s why my job is important . . . because I believe that economic (opportunities are) the place you’ve got to start if you are going to change lives.”