Panel OKs Community Bank Candidates

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s choices to help run the new Community Development Bank easily passed muster with a City Council committee Monday, bringing an ambitious project to turn around the city’s neediest neighborhoods closer to reality.

Riordan’s search for people to fill six of the 15 seats on the quasi-independent bank’s board of directors has been widely watched. That is because the directors will have virtual autonomy in running an institution that will handle hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funds funneled to parts of town that are considered too risky by most mainstream financial institutions.

Only Riordan’s choices require approval from the City Council. Los Angeles County, which is participating in the project, will fill one of the remaining nine seats. Eight others--a majority--are being chosen by some of the experts Riordan assembled early this year to help launch the bank, at no charge to the city, and by local college or university presidents.

The mayor’s choices are Denise Fairchild, president of the community development firm Neighborhood Strategies Group; John Gallarza, a vice president of TransWorld Bank; Antonio Gonzales, executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project; David Gonzales, a Wells Fargo Bank vice president; Ozie Gonzaque, a Los Angeles Housing Authority commissioner and a Red Cross board member, and Christopher W. Hammond, an attorney and deputy campaign manager for former Mayor Tom Bradley and president of Capital Vision Equities.

The Riordan Administration sees the bank as a big opportunity to make good on a campaign promise to stimulate the city’s economy by bringing jobs and services to impoverished communities.

The City Council insisted that members of those communities be included in the bank project and wanted safeguards to protect the city’s future federal social services grants--which would be used to pay back the federal government if the bank failed--and assurances that the bank’s funds would go to the most deserving.

Deputy Mayor Mary Leslie said completing board selections will enable the bank to get off the ground, and it could open by the first of the year. The bank was to have opened by summer but was delayed by negotiations with the Housing and Urban Development Department over changes in the operating agreement and other issues arising.