Potential RLA Leaders Don’t Want the Post

All five top corporate leaders whose names have been floated by the Riordan Administration as possible candidates to head RLA say they would not take the job, an indication of the difficulty that may lie ahead in attracting a high-level executive.

Former Lockheed Corp. Chairman Roy A. Anderson, former Arco President Robert E. Wycoff, former Home Savings of America Chief Executive Officer Richard H. Diehl, Southern California Edison Chairman John E. Bryson and First Interstate Bancorp Board Chairman Edward M. Carson all say they are too busy with other commitments to run the nonprofit riot recovery organization now headed by four co-chairs.

Moreover, Anderson said it may prove tough to attract a candidate with the qualifications sought by RLA’s executive committee and by Mayor Richard Riordan, who is collaborating in the search: a prominent corporate leader who would serve as an unpaid volunteer.

“It’s going to be difficult because (the job) is going to take time, and to pick a person with that kind of time and who is capable of really taking a hold of this kind of thing is not going to be easy,” said Anderson, who in January will become chairman of the Weingart Foundation, one of California’s largest philanthropic organizations. “There aren’t that many people floating around.”

Timing may also make the job a tough sell, observers say. While RLA has spent the last few months reorganizing and redefining its mission, the oft-criticized agency will have difficulty regaining its momentum more than 18 months after the devastating 1992 riots, some RLA board members acknowledge.

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“The role now is infinitely more difficult,” said RLA board member Ray Remy, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “The early commitments drew glamour. Those waves have already come ashore.”

Since its inception under the name Rebuild L.A., RLA has had difficulty in meeting the lofty goals envisioned for the organization, which was the city’s primary official response to the civil unrest. With little government funding and few new jobs being created by the private sector, RLA has been unable to make major progress toward the revitalization of the city’s riot-ravaged neighborhoods.

Said Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, an RLA board member: “It is not an easy job because the person would be inheriting what might be described as a beleaguered organization that has a herculean task.”

Last week, RLA’s 13-member executive committee voted unanimously to replace its multiethnic panel of four co-chairs with a single volunteer chief. The shake-up, which was supported by all four co-chairs, came less than two weeks after the co-chairs made the surprise announcement that RLA will need additional private contributions or public funds to operate in 1995.

Before the Riordan Administration floated its list of possible contenders last week, Riordan, who has raised questions in the past about the unwieldy nature of the extra-governmental agency, had asked Arco Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lodwrick M. Cook to consider taking the new single chief’s post. Cook quickly rejected the notion, explaining that he had too many other commitments, Riordan said.

Former 1984 Olympics czar Peter V. Ueberroth, who stepped down as an RLA co-chair in May, has also said he would not be interested in returning full-time to the organization that he was appointed to create by then-Mayor Tom Bradley in the wake of the 1992 riots.

Wycoff, who now serves as part-time chairman for LEARN, the educational reform coalition seeking to improve city schools by incorporating management training for principals and teachers, said he has not been personally contacted by Riordan about the RLA post.

“If I were asked, I’d have to turn it down because of my obligation to LEARN,” Wycoff said. “When you think about it, improving our educational system in this city is one of the more important things we can do to rebuild L.A.”

Anderson also said he had not been contacted by Riordan or members of RLA’s 13-member executive committee. “It’s a very important thing, there’s no question about it,” he said. “I just hope they really get a person who can devote the time.”

Home Savings spokeswoman Mary Trigg said that Diehl--who is continuing as chairman of the board of the bank’s parent firm, H. F. Ahmanson & Co., after stepping down as chief executive officer this month--does not have the time either.

“Even though all he knows is what he’s read in the newspaper, he is only semi-retired,” she said. “He really feels this position requires not just a full-time but a time-and-a-half person, and he is not in a position to do that.”

Bryson, in a prepared statement, said, “I’m flattered, but it’s a full-time job and I already have a full-time job.”

A spokesman for Carson said that he is unavailable for the job because he will not retire until the end of 1994.

Another possibility named by Riordan Administration officials--management consultant and Riordan campaign fund-raiser Peter Mullin--did not return calls for comment.

Riordan, who may also have other candidates in mind, is seeking to move quickly in appointing a new RLA chair. RLA officials are hoping that the mayor’s participation in the selection process will result in greater cooperation between the city and the organization. RLA executive committee members say they will move forward “as expeditiously as possible.” But they plan to follow a rigorous recruitment process, according to committee member Marilyn Solomon.

In the next week, a 16-member RLA committee will meet “to refine the criteria for the selection process and to establish a list of candidates,” RLA spokeswoman Vallee Bunting said Thursday.

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Three weeks ago, RLA’s co-chairs said that 70% of the agency’s spending has gone for salaries and administrative costs. But they refused to divulge the salaries of any of the organization’s 30 paid employees, including their own. After additional requests from The Times, a salary range data sheet was made public last week that revealed that co-chair Bernard Kinsey, a private business development consultant, has been paid $150,000 a year.

An RLA salary chart made available to The Times this week showed that two other RLA co-chairs are earning nearly three times as much as officials of the group had indicated in interviews last week. RLA pays $80,000 a year each for the services of co-chairs Tony M. Salazar and Linda J. Wong. Bunting confirmed these figures only after being informed that The Times had a copy of the chart.

Bunting said the data sheet released last week actually covered the fiscal year that ended June 30. Consequently, she said, salaries for the current co-chairs gleaned from the data were out of date.

The fourth co-chair, Barry Sanders, receives no RLA salary. An attorney on loan from Latham & Watkins, he continues to receive compensation as a partner in the law firm.

The salary chart also reveals that RLA funds are used to pay a portion of the salary of RLA’s chief operating officer, G. Edward Smith, as well as Salazar, even though both men are listed in RLA literature as being on loan from major corporations.

Salazar, Bunting said, continues to receive his regular paycheck from McCormack Baron & Associates, a national urban development firm, with RLA paying back $80,000 to the firm as a consulting fee.

RLA also pays a fee to Ernst & Young--$60,000, according to the data sheet--toward Smith’s salary, Bunting said.

On RLA literature, Smith is listed as “an executive on loan” from the national accounting firm. But Mort Meyerson, national director of public communications for Ernst & Young, said this week that the description is inaccurate.

“He’s been gone for several years,” Meyerson said. “It’s no big deal. We have good feelings toward him.”

Smith did not return calls for comment. Bunting said she had no immediate answers concerning the discrepancy.

A dozen members of RLA’s 96-member board of directors have said in interviews that they had not been aware of the amount of funds expended to pay the co-chairs. Only a handful expressed a negative reaction to the salary levels, but Ridley-Thomas said the situation showed a breakdown in staff-board relationships.

“I’d been asking for a financial statement of the organization for the past year and they were not forthcoming,” Ridley-Thomas said. “No board member could get that. . . . That’s why board members have been in many respects disenchanted, but have wanted to be as helpful, rather than as publicly critical, as possible.”

RLA, as a tax-exempt public benefit corporation, is required by state and federal law to annually file a public list of the compensation earned by its officers and five highest-paid employees, according to officials of the state attorney general’s office of charitable trusts.

The deadline for filing these annual reports for fiscal 1993 with the state attorney general’s office and the Internal Revenue Service was last Monday. But RLA instead filed for an extension, which it has received, Bunting said.

“There’s still some accounting things that are still outstanding,” said the RLA spokeswoman. “I’m not certain what those things are.”