Gore Announces Tax Breaks for Pacoima

Vice President Al Gore brought a kind of closure to the Los Angeles riots Saturday, announcing up to $600 million in tax incentives for poor neighborhoods just a mile from the site of the Rodney King beating.

King’s confrontation with police in 1991 in Lake View Terrace started a chain of events that led to the riots a year later, which in turn spurred lawmakers to create “empowerment zones” granting tax breaks to depressed areas.

The city lost out on its first bid in 1994 to get an empowerment zone, but Gore’s designation Saturday of Pacoima and parts of central and south Los Angeles made up for the earlier disappointment, city officials said.

“President Clinton and I have fought hard to make certain that we have special efforts in communities that . . . have sometimes been left behind,” Gore told a cheering crowd at Pacoima Elementary School that included Mayor Richard Riordan and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

“It’s just a little hand up, not a handout,” Gore said.

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Companies operating within the zone will gain $3,000-per-person tax credits for hiring employees from specified neighborhoods--Pacoima, South-Central, Boyle Heights, downtown, Watts and Willowbrook.

As expected, Gore also unveiled a $2.25-billion program aimed at making sure every school and library in the country is hooked up to the Internet by 2000.

On the last day of a three-day trip to California, Gore continued his practice of ignoring the sex scandal surrounding the president and instead focused on his hallmark issues: education, environment and technology.

He highlighted the Internet program Saturday morning with a visit to a group of students at Pacoima Elementary, a school that has gotten too little good news in recent years. Statistics show that up to 40% of the local families live in poverty. More than 80% of the children have trouble speaking English. And though test scores have improved, the school still ranked 37th in the district’s list of the 100 lowest-performing schools last year.

But with Gore in the room, the children could focus on something besides the gang graffiti scrawled on nearby liquor stores and pawnshops. Fifth-grader Grace Magana told the vice president she likes using the computer to write. Ten-year-old Joe Gutierrez showed an angel he drew. Jose Estrada said he likes computers because they’re smart.

“Give me an example of something you learned on the computer,” Gore asked one boy.

“I learned to spell more,” the boy said.

Then Gore asked a nervous Estrada to join him at the front of the room to submit electronically the Los Angeles Unified School District’s application for a portion of the $2.25 billion in Internet money. The two joined hands and clicked a mouse button that sent the application over the Internet. Then they exchanged high fives.

“What do we need paperwork for? We’ve got the Internet,” Gore said.

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In the cafeteria, the mostly Latino audience of 500 roared in appreciation when Gore tried out his rudimentary Spanish. “Querer es poder. Si, se puede,” he said, meaning, roughly, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and “It can be done.”

As Gore left to the strains of “La Bamba”--a song by Pacoima native son Ritchie Valens that prompted Riordan to engage in an awkward little dance with a parent--several audience members said they got something from the visit.

Cafeteria manager Sharon Blosser made Gore a part of her family history. She served bananas, strawberries and raspberries to the vice president on the bone china her parents gave her for Christmas 38 years ago. Gore brought his own tea, she said.

“I’m so excited. Now I can say the vice president ate off my china,” said Blosser.

One person who didn’t get everything he wanted was Principal Larry Gonzales, who had hoped to ask the ecologically minded Gore for money to buy a tree for the playground. But that was no cause for disappointment, he said.

“I’ll take what we got any time,” he said. “He gave us hope for the future.”