Judge Keeps Redevelopment Spending Cap : Urban renewal: Ruling maintains $750-million limit on Downtown projects. City sought increase to $7.1 billion.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge decided Tuesday that she is powerless to undo a spending cap that curbs plans to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into revitalizing Los Angeles’ Downtown business core.

The ruling by Judge Florence Pickard was a victory for 83-year-old Ernani Bernardi, the curmudgeonly former councilman from Van Nuys who has made it his personal crusade--both during his years at City Hall and now in retirement--to limit the activities of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

By her ruling, Pickard let stand a 1977 agreement reached between Bernardi and the city limiting the CRA to spending $750 million to improve the so-called Central Business District redevelopment project.

Having already spent almost $750 million, the agency wants to raise the 1977 spending cap to $7.1 billion, contending its Downtown urban renewal is far from complete. “There are a whole host of things that need to be done,” said Don Spivack, CRA operations director.

Mayor Richard Riordan’s office did not comment on Pickard’s ruling, but Bernardi said he is pleased.

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“It’s not for me but for the 3.5 million other people in the city that I’m happy,” said Bernardi, who retired from the Los Angeles City Council in 1993.

Bernardi has argued for years that the CRA is an arrogant and unaccountable agency that steals tax dollars needed for more pressing municipal services.

CRA officials decried Tuesday’s ruling, saying it, in effect, has given Bernardi veto power over civic projects approved by locally elected lawmakers that are intended to eradicate blight and provide new housing and job opportunities in the city’s Downtown core.

“The question now is: Should one man . . . be able to frustrate the will of the elected representatives of 3 1/2 million people,” said assistant city attorney Dov Lesel, who has represented the CRA in the Bernardi litigation.

Although the city agreed to the cap in 1977, it has now changed its mind, as it is entitled to do, Lesel said.

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Barbara Blinderman, Bernardi’s attorney, denied accusations that Bernardi is engaged in a selfish, one-man crusade. Her client’s original lawsuit--brought in the 1970s and resulting in the 1977 stipulated agreement--was filed on behalf of all city taxpayers to protect their interests, she said.

During his three decades as a councilman, Bernardi persistently criticized city waste and urged belt-tightening measures.

Spivack said that although the CRA has talked of setting a new spending cap at $7.1 billion, that figure grossly exaggerates the amount the agency would spend.

“We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars now,” he said.

Unless the cap is raised, no new projects can be implemented.

“We’re pretty much on hold now,” Spivack said. “All the money that’s being spent is pretty much all going to pay off debts [on old projects], not new projects.”

The long-range plans affected include rehabilitating hundreds of units in aging hotels to make them habitable by low-income families; bringing new life to vacant or under-utilized office buildings along Spring Street, Broadway and 6th and 7th streets; developing new housing in the South Park area; building new parks in Central City East--an area with 14,000 inhabitants and only two small parks, and repaving the pockmarked Broadway.

Spivack said that if the CRA is denied the financial wherewithal to proceed with these plans, then “other jurisdictions or the private sector” will have to pick up the revitalization tab.

“But that is unlikely to happen,” he said. “That’s why we need this 1977 stipulated judgment amended.”