City Leaders Use Caution in Naming Quake Recovery Efforts : Government: Officials hesitate to refer to plans as redevelopment projects because of feelings about eminent domain, bureaucratic costs.

During a recent meeting of a quake recovery panel, Los Angeles Councilman Hal Bernson was quick to correct a housing official who dared to use the term redevelopment area to describe a proposal to help quake victims get back on their feet.

“Let’s call them recovery areas, please,” Bernson said, referring to the proposed districts where property taxes would pay for quake improvements.

Although the post-quake proposal is drawn directly from the pages of the state’s redevelopment laws, city officials are hesitant to refer to them as redevelopment projects. And with good reason: For years, redevelopment projects have been the bogyman among governmental programs.

In North Hollywood, Hollywood and Downtown Los Angeles, redevelopment has incited lawsuits, criticism, scuffling matches at redevelopment advisory panel meetings and even death threats.

So it is no wonder city lawmakers are moving ahead with caution on the latest incarnation of this financing mechanism.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, whose district includes the hard-hit Sherman Oaks area, has not thrown his full support behind the idea. But he held a community meeting last month to gauge his constituents’ response--and that response was mixed.

“We want to take the temperature of the public to see how they react,” Yaroslavsky said prior to the meeting. “We are not going to ram this down anybody’s throat.”

Yaroslavsky’s district is one of nine in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and central Los Angeles being considered by the Community Redevelopment Agency. The project areas would officially be known by the politically unsavory title of “emergency redevelopment areas.”

Redevelopment areas are a tool state lawmakers provided more than 40 years ago to help eliminate blight by giving local government--through its redevelopment agencies--the power to buy land, build roads and sewers and make other improvements that may attract private development.

To fund these improvements, the state allows redevelopment agencies to keep all the property taxes generated by new development, a method known as tax-increment financing. Normally, property taxes are split among the county, local school districts and the city.

Under disaster provisions of the state’s redevelopment law, cities can also establish redevelopment areas in communities hit hard by disasters, without the time-consuming environmental studies required for traditional redevelopment projects. But to do so, the project areas must be established relatively soon after the disaster--in this case by October or November.

The biggest bugaboo of the redevelopment process has been the powers of eminent domain it bestows on the CRA, allowing it to condemn private land within project areas to make way for redevelopment.

A recent council panel discussion about the quake redevelopment areas raised the ire of longtime CRA critic Howard Watts, who attended the meeting wearing his trademark white T-shirt with big bold letters spelling out: “CRA GO AWAY.”

“When you recover, you don’t recover by taking away everybody’s homes and businesses,” he told the panel.

But CRA officials and council members have emphasized that under the special disaster provisions, powers of eminent domain are limited to abandoned properties and so-called nuisance properties that the owner cannot or will not rebuild.

“This will not be a (traditional) redevelopment area,” Bernson said.

Another possible target of criticism in the emergency redevelopment projects is the CRA’s ability to use redevelopment dollars on non-disaster related improvements, such as new streets and sewers that do not replace those damaged by the quake.

William Carlson, executive director of the nonprofit California Redevelopment Assn., said a bill to more closely tie the use of redevelopment money to disaster recovery is moving through the state Legislature.

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, whose Hollywood-based district lost almost 5,000 residential units in the quake, has not decided whether she will back the quake-recovery area idea but “we are definitely taking the public’s temperature to see how people think a redevelopment area can help,” said Sharon Delugach, Goldberg’s chief deputy.

Based on her firsthand experience with the delays and lawsuits of the Hollywood redevelopment project--among the largest in the country--Delugach said Goldberg is keenly aware of the potential for controversy.

A $750-million redevelopment project in Downtown Los Angeles also has had its share of strife. That project has been bogged down by a lawsuit filed last year by former Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who claims a closed-door meeting to discuss its expansion violated the state’s open meeting laws.

Examples of how nasty the politics of redevelopment can get are easily found in the recent history of the North Hollywood Redevelopment Project.

In March, the CRA’s offices in North Hollywood were temporarily closed because the project’s manager received numerous death threats, culminating in the arrival of a hearse. New security measures were installed when the office reopened.

Meetings of a citizens’ advisory panel for the North Hollywood project have been interrupted by walkouts, shouting matches and scuffles between redevelopment critics and boosters.

Mildred Weller, a longtime CRA critic and vice chair of the advisory panel, said that having lost her Sherman Oaks apartment in the quake, she understands the need for efforts to help quake victims.

But she said establishing emergency redevelopment areas is “the most appalling idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

She claims the CRA’s bureaucracy makes the cost of improvements three times as high as the cost of improvements done by private firms.

If the city wants to avoid controversy, Weller said it should forget about new redevelopment projects.

“A redevelopment area is the worst possible way of solving the problem,” she said.