Council Gives Brickbats, Bouquets to Rebuild L.A.

Rebuild L.A. got the same mixed reaction from the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday that it has in the community--receiving harsh criticism from two lawmakers representing riot-damaged areas and an official city proclamation praising its first-year efforts.

“We hit people over the head,” Council President John Ferraro said, “and then we give them a plaque.”

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has led the council’s recovery efforts, invited to the council meeting the leaders of RLA, as the group is now known. He chastised the nonprofit RLA for not cooperating with local politicians in its efforts to attract businesses to the inner city.

“To whom are you accountable?” he bluntly asked the group’s five co-chairs--Peter V. Ueberroth, Tony Salazar, Barry A. Sanders, Bernard Kinsey and, the newest member, Linda Wong.

He later criticized the organization for avoiding the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Recovery and Revitalization, which Ridley-Thomas chairs, and for pushing him and other elected officials to the side in RLA’s work.

But other council members came to the group’s aid. And leaders of RLA, touting more than $500 million in investments to the inner city since last year’s riots, contended that much of the criticism stemmed from a misperception of RLA’s role.

Ridley-Thomas said in an interview that the group has exaggerated its accomplishments and taken credit for business openings in which it played a minor role. He belongs to RLA’s 80-member board of directors but has dismissed it as a “dog and pony show.”

Councilwoman Rita Walters, whose 10th District suffered the most riot damage, joined in the attack, saying that RLA was virtually ignoring her district.

Others, however, backed the private group’s work since Mayor Tom Bradley and Gov. Pete Wilson announced its creation May 2, 1992--days after violence broke out across the city.

“I think RLA has done a lot of good things,” Councilman Joel Wachs said. “Who says they are supposed to do it all?”

Councilman Ernani Bernardi said RLA should remain independent of the City Council, despite some council members’ complaints.

“The worst thing that could happen to this committee is if it turned into an adjunct of 15 members of the City Council,” he said. “It would really turn out to be a disaster.”

In an interview afterward, some of RLA’s leaders shrugged off the criticism, saying that some critics have expanded RLA’s mission far beyond helping to attract businesses to the county’s neglected areas.

“There are 9 million people out there,” Sanders said. “Some will criticize.”

In a later meeting with editors and reporters at the Los Angeles Times, RLA leaders spoke out against critical press coverage of RLA’s first year and the paper’s omission of some business announcements.

“There’s no way that RLA is going to solve all the problems of Los Angeles in one year,” Kinsey said. “Our plan is a five-year plan and we’re very proud of what we’ve done.”

Sanders added: “We’ve been criticized from the very beginning by people who don’t know our mission. . . . We have been treated by many as if we’re a government agency. . . . If you come at us like that we will look like failures.”

Although Bradley selected Ueberroth, the president of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, to head the venture, Ueberroth said he has sought to expand the group’s leadership and play a lesser role. He said he has become a lightning rod for controversy by those who regard him as a “white Republican from Laguna Beach.”