When L.A. Considers Piling on More Debt, Who Ya Gonna Call?

A proposal to build a $200-million sports complex in downtown Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Kings and Lakers has already sparked heated debate around City Hall over the ultimate cost to city taxpayers.

So heated that the name of an old combatant in the tax wars surfaced this week in connection with the dispute.

At a news conference Tuesday to blast the sports arena deal near the Los Angeles Convention Center, Councilman Nate Holden said he’s going to seek help from former councilman Ernani Bernardi.

“He’s the real expert at stopping these things,” Holden said. “I’m going to call him today.”

Holden was referring to the tenacious Bernardi’s long-running battle with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and his so-far-successful lawsuit that has kept the agency from lifting a spending cap on its massive Central Business District Redevelopment Area.

Bernardi has long argued that the tax revenue growth that flows from new development in the project should go to the city, county, school districts and other agencies, but not the CRA.

In an interview, Bernardi said he has not talked to Holden but has strong feelings about the arena proposal. First of all, he said the CRA has not yet paid off $750 million in bonds to revitalize the downtown area, so he is critical of the city for considering another $200 million in debt.

“They’ve got to pay off the $750 million first,” he said.

Bernardi also wondered why the city doesn’t shell out to simply fix up the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

“Why don’t they design it like a shoe and have Nike sponsor it?” he joked.

Turf Talk

Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, the longtime San Fernando Valley representative, turned the tables on some of his council colleagues who represent parts of downtown this week when he argued against the proposed sports complex.

In the past few years, the council has erupted into some nasty cross-town battles as South and Central Los Angeles council members have harshly criticized the Valley for getting millions in federal earthquake grants and reductions in water and sewer rates at the expense of other parts of the city.

But as the council considered a proposal this week to help fund the sports arena, Wachs gave his colleagues a taste of their own medicine.

He argued that taxpayers would be on the line for $5 million to $8 million a year for 25 years to fund the project for the benefit of, you guessed it, downtown residents.

Wachs started his argument by saying that the complex won’t be creating enough jobs to justify the cost.

“My God, for the few jobs this is going to create, you can pay people straight out [of the city’s budget] and still save yourself money,” he said.

Then, Wachs addressed Councilman Richard Alarcon, who supported the complex deal.

“Mr. Alarcon, you say this is about the heart of the city, spending $200 million on the heart of the city? Why do we have secession? We have secession because we are not spending $200 million in each of the neighborhoods around the city that want to secede.”

Ultimately, Wachs was the lone dissenter on an 11-1 vote. Fellow dissenter Nate Holden was absent.

Tough Talk

Although the Valley secession bill has been laid to rest, at least for the time being, state Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) is not about to let bygones be bygones with the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills).

Lockyer’s enmity for Boland was apparent this week at a meeting sponsored by the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Valley Alliance at the Milken Center in West Hills.

Lockyer told a crowd of about 100 that “it was very difficult to communicate [with her]. . . . All she could do was call me names.”

He also engaged in a somewhat heated historical debate with a member of the audience who sought to compare the question of who should vote on Valley secession to the American Revolution.

“If England had voted on whether the colonies would break away, we would still be there,” said Debra Greenfield of West Hills.

Lockyer preferred a Civil War analogy in which Valley secessionists are compared to John C. Calhoun, who argued that states wanting to leave the union should just do it, without regard for their sister states.

He followed with an impassioned speech about the need to work together in a diverse city, not withdraw, drawing vigorous applause from the audience.

In arguing that all voters of Los Angeles should have a say in its future, Lockyer spoke of Los Angeles “as perhaps the greatest city on the planet . . . an incredible thing that we shouldn’t destroy lightly.

“If we re-tribalize, we may cause this country and its great potential to be lost,” Lockyer said.

The ultimate beneficiary of Lockyer’s scorn for Boland may be her November opponent, former U.S. attorney Adam Schiff.

Schiff and Boland are battling it out to see who will replace retiring Republican Sen. Newt Russell in a Glendale-Burbank district.

Lockyer’s raison d’etre these days is raising money for Democratic state Senate candidates. If his rhetoric was any indication, he may really pour it on for Schiff.

Idle Talk

The controversial Los Angeles City Council vote this week to create an appointed citizens panel to consider government reform basically revived a 1990 proposal by Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

But over the past six years, the proposal to appoint a 21-member citizens commission has remained idle, collecting dust in some City Hall file cabinet.

This week, when the council voted to revive Galanter’s proposal, she was repeatedly asked why, if the reform panel is such a good idea, had it languished for six years.

Galanter’s response has been that the proposal was out of her hands and in the Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, which has failed to move the idea forward because staffing for the proposed commission was estimated to cost between $1 million and $2 million.

The head of the committee at that time: former councilman and current County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

Galanter’s reform panel is not the first to stall. In 1963, a “Town Hall” report on recommended charter reforms was drafted but never fully adopted.

In 1969, a citizens commission completed another unsuccessful plan on overhauling the city’s governing charter, titled “Los Angeles: Work Still to be Done.”

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QUOTABLE: “It would be a real shame if a genuine push for reform gets bushwhacked by mayor and council acrimony.”

Councilman Mike Feuer, on the competing city charter reform proposals