Santa Ana Plays $10-Million Game of ‘What If ‘

Santa Ana officials asked William Ray to play a game: take $10 million and spend it on whatever you want.

He and 45 other business and community leaders circled the board game on Wednesday, scanned the categories and wondered, what do you attack first:

* A young labor force that lacks the most basic skills.

* A perception that the city is unsafe, both for its residents and those who work there.

* A need for affordable child care, parenting classes and mentors for young adults.

Seemingly a game of Monopoly designed for the public sector, the exercise was a dead-serious look at how to tackle some of the troubles facing one of Orange County’s most impoverished cities.

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Santa Ana is looking for answers in a massive federal urban revitalization program, known as an empowerment zone. If the city wins one of 15 coveted spots, it would pump more than $100 million into some of its blighted neighborhoods over a 10-year period.

The city will learn by the end of the year whether it has been selected for an empowerment zone. The application is due in Washington on Oct. 9.

For two months now, groups of school, business, community and religious leaders have gathered to help city officials focus the 150-page application.

To help brainstorm ideas, each participant must play “Empoweropoly.” Modeled after the classic real-estate board game, players are handed $10 million in fake money and must divvy up the cash among the board’s offerings. They include such programs as welfare-to-work, business loans, and job training.

Ray, a community liaison for U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), said he plunked down cash on child care and affordable housing programs. Family counseling and parent education received several million dollars from Ernie Rodriguez, the owner of Santa Ana-based Southern California Plastics.

“Everything is based on the family,” said Rodriguez. “And if we don’t start with the parents, what can we expect from the offspring?”

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While the focus is jobs and economic stimulation, winning an empowerment zone could mean help for other segments of the community.

“Any time that you work with parents, it trickles down to the kids,” said Nadine Rodriguez, the principal of Roosevelt Elementary School. One of 10 schools that sit in the zone area, Roosevelt enrolls some of the neediest children in the city.

Many of the students live in cramped apartments with several families. They also are overcrowded at the school, which was designed for 800 students but more than 1,200 will attend this year. Only 35% of children under 5 were immunized last year, she said, and almost every student--an estimated 98%--isn’t fluent in English.

The students’ plight is typical of the problems in the zone area, which officials said includes some of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. The area is composed of seven census tracts--measuring an estimated 3,000 acres--on the east side of Santa Ana and some scattered downtown neighborhoods. It includes 50,000 residents.

Besides $100 million in economic aid, the empowerment zone program offers tax breaks for employers as a way to reinvigorate impoverished neighborhoods.

“The idea [of an empowerment zone] is to turn an area around and provide jobs,” said Maryann Soos, a spokeswoman in the Los Angeles office of Housing and Urban Development. The federal agency administers the empowerment zone program.

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Empowerment zones were granted to five cities in 1994: Detroit, Chicago, New York, Atlanta and Baltimore. Los Angeles originally applied in 1994, but federal officials rejected the city’s application as vague and incomplete. In January, Los Angeles and Cleveland were added to the list.

Santa Ana couldn’t apply in 1994 because it didn’t meet the poverty guidelines. The complicated federal formula has changed and the city is now eligible.

Although HUD officials won’t say what other cities are considering applications, Santa Ana officials said other California cities are expected to compete for empowerment zone status.

Cities are judged on their proposal, which must show that private business and local government will work together to spur improvements to the areas.

After hearing from community members for the last two months, Santa Ana officials are about to begin writing the application. They said they would focus most of it on ways to create jobs, train unskilled workers and augment educational opportunities for residents in the zone area.

“We have a very diverse community and we have a lot of needs,” City Councilwoman Patricia A. McGuigan said.

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Empowerment Zone

The city of Santa Ana is applying for one of 15 urban empowerment zones that will be granted by the federal government at the end of the year. Empowerment zone status would bring an estimated $100 million over 10 years in economic aid including tax breaks for employers and new social spending to revitalize blighted neighborhoods in the city.

Source: City of Santa Ana