SHERMAN OAKS : City to Weigh Plan for Quake Recovery

The City Council will decide on Tuesday whether to establish in Sherman Oaks an emergency recovery area. If approved, it would be the first such area to be created in the San Fernando Valley.

In an official emergency recovery area, the approval process for a redevelopment plan is greatly streamlined.

The proposed $18.8-million redevelopment project for the area would funnel funds into the community for rebuilding earthquake-damaged residential and commercial properties and for making infrastructure improvements. The money would come from bond sales that would be repaid by an expected increase in local property tax revenues due to the improvements.

The 570-acre area is roughly bordered by the Ventura Freeway, the San Diego Freeway, Ventura Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon Avenue.

Five other proposed redevelopment areas--located in areas surrounding Northridge, Reseda, North Hollywood, Pacoima and East Hollywood--will be considered by the City Council beginning next Wednesday.

The Sherman Oaks project has pitted the area’s homeowners, who oppose the redevelopment plan created by the Community Redevelopment Agency, against merchants who favor it.

On Monday at 9:30 a.m., the influential Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. will hold a press conference at which members plan to deliver a petition opposing the proposal to City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. Scott Harvey, co-chairman of the association’s CRA Study Committee, said his group would spend the weekend gathering signatures.

“We think Zev is laboring under the misimpression about what the community response is, because it’s filtered through his staff,” Harvey said. “So we’re having the press conference to provide to him data which we have collected.”

Yaroslavsky has not yet stated his position on the proposal, but this week he suggested that he is leaning toward backing it.

“We’re moving in the direction of implementing it and supporting it,” Yaroslavsky said this week. “We haven’t made a final decision.”

The councilman has said he will approve a redevelopment project only if the community wants it.

But the two segments of the community, so far, have expressed divergent views.

The homeowners group feels the proposal does not have adequate limits on the redevelopment agency’s powers of eminent domain and could allow too much money to be spent on infrastructure improvements at the expense of residential rebuilding. The group also wants a cap added to the plan on the administrative overhead portion of the budget.

But the Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce believes the proposal provides sorely needed funds to rebuild housing in the community while adequately limiting the agency’s powers of eminent domain and planning.