Last Chance for RLA? : Two top prospects in line to be the new heads of Rebuild Los Angeles

Two fine Los Angeles civic leaders--Arco Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lodwrick M. Cook and businesswoman and former Deputy Mayor Linda Griego--have been tapped to head Rebuild Los Angeles, now known as RLA. Word of their appointments, expected to become official next week after a vote by the RLA’s 96-member board, is being greeted with enthusiasm. Continuing concerns about RLA lie not with its new leaders but with RLA itself--how it is structured and its controversial past.

RLA, brought together a few days after the 1992 riots by then-Mayor Tom Bradley, was an attempt to get the city back on its feet after the nation’s worst urban riots of the century. It was a time of great confusion and angst for Los Angeles, and the after-effects of that wrenching time continue today.

RLA, originally headed by former Olympic czar Peter V. Ueberroth, was in many ways based on the private-enterprise model that made the 1984 Games a success. But the task of rebuilding Los Angeles proved far more daunting than organizing a two-week international event.

Some even objected to the original name, Rebuild L.A., arguing that the city needed to do much more than merely replace structures and institutions that had not served all of its diverse populations very well.

Soon criticism mounted, some of it stemming from unreasonable expectations that RLA somehow was supposed to cure all of the region’s social and economic ills.

As new leaders assume the RLA mantle, now is an excellent time for a redoubled effort toward what RLA is best suited to do--economic development.

It’s also time for government officials at every level to pick up the ball in their areas of responsibility: They must create social and economic policies that facilitate RLA’s work.

In the first few days after the devastating Northridge earthquake most of the walls that mark political turf in the city, county and state dropped. People were focused on surviving or helping. If the politicians can find a way to recapture that spirit of cooperation, RLA and all of Los Angeles will have a better chance this time around.