Cisneros Hints at Aid Program for Cities Along Alameda Corridor

The Clinton administration dangled an enticing financial reward before the Los Angeles region Tuesday, suggesting that if the president is reelected next month his administration would probably give special breaks intended to improve communities along the Alameda Corridor road and rail project.

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros said the administration would consider the $1.8-billion Alameda Corridor project a good candidate for designation as a federal empowerment zone. “We’re so impressed that I believe, if we have a second round of empowerment zones, that will be [a] most competitive” application, he said.

Empowerment zones are a government tool designed to help poverty-stricken urban areas lure employers through social service grants and tax incentives. The federal government already has approved seed money and loan guarantees for the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile project intended to enhance road and rail links between distribution centers near downtown Los Angeles and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

“It makes so much sense” to link the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to the nation’s inland rail lines, Cisneros said. “This is the way L.A. will determine its future.”

President Clinton has said he would support another round of empowerment zone designations. Congress would have to appropriate funds for the projects, although lawmakers would not be expected to dictate what cities would be in the zone.

One of the largest public works projects in the nation, the planned truck and train thoroughfare is considered vital to the harbor complex, which is scrambling to keep up with rising trade volume. A fourth of all U.S. international trade arriving or departing by ship passes through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which would be served by the Alameda Corridor project upon its expected completion in 2001.

But short-term funding for design and support work is running low as the ports and the cities along the route conduct their legal spat. Significant construction has yet to begin. At its peak, the project is expected to generate 10,000 construction jobs.

It may take nothing short of a federal inducement such as empowerment zone status to unite many of the small cities and neighborhoods along the Alameda Corridor.

A number of smaller cities, including Compton, Lynwood, South Gate and Vernon, have filed suit against Long Beach and Los Angeles in a bid to get more clout in the apportionment of jobs and economic benefits from the project. Efforts to settle the suit are now stalled.

If those communities were to apply as a group for designation as an empowerment zone, they would be forced to pool their efforts and, as a practical matter, would almost certainly have to drop their lawsuit. Federal officials said that these cities would be better off if they focus on the long-term community-development opportunities that the project affords.

Officials from the ports and the cities along the planned route said Tuesday they would welcome an empowerment zone designation, particularly if it were to be combined with other incentives.

“We would be strongly supportive of the designation,” said Jonathan Y. Thomas, a Port of Los Angeles commissioner.

Some depressed areas in the smaller cities that line the 20-mile thoroughfare were included in Los Angeles’ 1994 application for empowerment zone status, which was rejected. Since then, Los Angeles has received millions in federal assistance, but “we got nothing,” said one representative of the smaller corridor cities.

Eduardo Olivo, an attorney for the smaller corridor cities in the lawsuit against the ports, said the empowerment zone idea “sounds like something the corridor cities would look on favorably.”

Cisneros’ comments came on the same day he released a report in Detroit underlining the importance of linking the economic development of central cities to the growing prosperity of the metropolitan areas in which they are located.

Cisneros’ oft-repeated assertion that the nation’s cities have bottomed out and are on their way back comes amid a growing debate between Democrats and Republicans about how to restore prosperity to urban neighborhoods blighted by the flight of industry.

Times staff writer Jeff Leeds contributed to this story.