Anti-Gang Program Faces Fight for Funds : Budget: Hope in Youth’s organizers want the city to double its contribution to $5 million. Council is divided on the year-old group’s effectiveness.

A priest and a team of social workers came to Los Angeles City Hall recently to describe a program that they say is the best hope for reducing the city’s scourge of gangs and violence.

By the time they were gone, leaving behind their request for $5 million, the organizers of the Hope in Youth program were being praised by some officials as visionaries and damned by others as arrogant and intimidating.

The fight over whether the church-based anti-gang program will get its money looms as the biggest remaining battle confronting Mayor Richard Riordan’s $4.3-billion municipal budget. On Monday or Tuesday, the City Council is expected to decide whether to double funding for the program in just its second year, as Riordan promised he would when he was running for mayor.

Most council members have signaled that they will support Riordan in his main budget proposal of expanding the Police Department and vote to postpone his plans to consolidate several city departments.

But the fate of Hope in Youth is unclear.

The program was launched a year ago when nine religious denominations and four community activist groups proposed flooding the county’s most downtrodden neighborhoods with 480 social workers. Organized into 160 three-person teams, the workers would try to find activities for young people and work with school officials and parents to offer support and guidance.

Hope in Youth’s boosters, who include Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, had unusual success last year in attracting financial support for an unproven, fledgling program. The city gave $2.5 million, the county more than $2.9 million and the state $2 million, for a total of $7.4 million.

“The investment is so insignificant, compared to the end result,” said Councilman Richard Alatorre, the top booster for the program on the City Council. “It costs a lot less to do this on the front end than on the back end . . . by discouraging people (from) getting into the juvenile justice system or being wards of the state of California.”

But opponents such as Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas say Hope in Youth is untested and is being given more money than any other anti-gang effort in the city, despite its lack of a track record.

“How do we justify giving $5 million to this unproven group when there are so many other groups that ought to have the opportunity to compete for the money?” Ridley-Thomas said.

City officials monitoring Hope in Youth said they have not been able to gauge whether the program is achieving its goals because the group has not laid out a set of criteria that can be measured. Some have said this means that the program has not complied with its contract with the city.

“They feel they don’t have to do the same mundane things that other programs have to do,” said one official, who asked not to be identified.

Greg Fitzgerald, the project’s director, vehemently denied that the group has been uncooperative. He said the first social workers only completed their training and began work in April and that there has not been enough time to summarize the nearly 14,000 contacts they have made with teen-agers, parents and school officials. A computer program is being designed to aid in the work, he said.

Thirty-four Hope in Youth teams have been hired and 10 took to the field in April. The $30,000-a-year social workers are organizing teen-agers and adults in four Los Angeles neighborhoods, two Pasadena neighborhoods and neighborhoods in Altadena, Baldwin Park, Compton and Pomona, Fitzgerald said.

In a debate before a City Council committee last week, city overseers and the program’s directors could not agree whether Hope in Youth has provided adequate information to the city. The sharp exchange ended with Lou Negrete, chairman of the Hope in Youth campaign, accusing city officials of “sandbagging” the funding request.

Most of Hope in Youth’s lobbying has been directed at state and local government officials. But this spring, they persuaded Rep. Matthew G. Martinez (D-Monterey Park) to attach an amendment to the federal crime bill that would give programs like Hope in Youth a total of up to $20 million.

The bill must receive final approval and then separate legislation is needed to appropriate the money before Los Angeles can compete with other cities for the funds. Hope in Youth organizers are banking on connections with the Clinton Administration to bring a lion’s share of the funds back to Los Angeles, according to one source.