SPECIAL REPORT * Merchants who want space for patrons’ cars, children who need a school closer to home, a wavering councilwoman and racial undertones add up to the no-win bureaucratic battle of . . . : The Parking Lot Versus the Pupils

By bowing to pressure from a group of neighborhood businesses, City Councilwoman Rita Walters has allowed a standoff over a closed, city-owned parking lot to string along for months, and her intervention may force as many as 240 kindergartners to ride buses across town next year rather than attend a proposed new neighborhood school on the property.

Walters’ actions have frustrated supporters of the school and--ironically--failed to please the business owners, who want the parking lot opened so they can lure customers to an area that is enjoying an economic revival. But instead of more than a hundred parking spaces for their customers, those business owners daily are confronted with a useless piece of fenced pavement, striped for parking spaces but closed to traffic.

The tale of the parking lot, though it involves a single neighborhood, underscores some of the fundamental frustrations that so many people have with Los Angeles government, where political agendas and petty conflicting interests all too often trigger a bureaucratic meltdown. What’s more, this conflict, like so many at City Hall, has a racial undercurrent: The merchants who need the parking are predominantly black. The children who face the prospect of kindergarten busing are predominantly Latino.

Just about everyone feels wronged.

“I feel this is a hit at South-Central,” said H. Davis, who runs a dress store near the locked parking lot. “This wouldn’t happen this way in another part of the city.”

Piles of trash are heaped around the edges of the lot near Vermont Avenue and 59th Street. For five years, locked gates have prevented anyone from parking on the one-acre parcel. It was closed not long after the 1992 riots because it was home to drug dealing, car stripping and other unsavory activity.

Spying the wasted space, a special schools task force formed by Mayor Richard Riordan and Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias last year recommended the site as a prime candidate for a primary center, where young children could go to school. Building it would mean that 240 South-Central kindergartners could walk to school rather than being bused to the Westside or East Los Angeles.

The trouble is that nearby businesses, struggling to stay afloat, still want the parking, and they appear to have the backing of Walters, who initially suggested the site for a school but then wavered. Walters has not, however, managed to unlock the parking lot, so it remains off limits, helping no one except people looking to dump their trash illegally.

Faced with the conflicting pressures between school advocates and store owners, Walters has privately backed the business people while publicly sending mixed signals.

Last week, one of her aides, Delpha Flad, said Walters opposed the school proposal because she favored leaving the lot vacant so she could try to lure a supermarket or other store to a neighboring site. But a second Walters aide, John Sheppard, said that idea was just an option, not the councilwoman’s true position.

“Her position is that there is no position at this point,” he said. “We would like to see what is going on at the conditional use hearing [on the proposed school] before she comes to a position.”

The councilwoman herself was unavailable for comment.

The result of all those City Hall machinations: 240 children may spend more than an hour a day of their first year in school on buses. Merchants who could use the boost of a parking lot face possible bankruptcy. And residents who live near the lot are afflicted with the blight it attracts--as they have been for five long years.

And all of that is courtesy of City Hall.

Dr. Anthony Pickett, whose maternity center could use the parking lot behind his building, said the entire episode has been an example of government callousness and inefficiency. At one point, Pickett said, Walters’ office told the Vermont Avenue merchants that they could come downtown and pick up the keys to the parking lot.

That was the week before Christmas, Pickett recalled. The next week, the same merchants were told: “Nope, we have other plans for that.”

In Riordan’s office, the face-off is a source of disappointment and concern, as mayoral aides worry that the delay may prevent a school from opening by September--a tight schedule that is only possible by using prefabricated construction material and by moving the approval process along quickly.

Riordan confesses frustration, though he declines to criticize Walters.

“We have to look at the site based on the principle of what is in the best interests of children,” the mayor said, adding that overcrowded schools and long bus rides obviously are not. “It is clear to me that it is in the best interests of children to use this site as a primary center.”

A few floors away, in Walters’ office, aides acknowledge that the current situation is not helping anyone, but insist the issue is more complicated than it appears. There are studies to perform, committees to convene, hearings to hold. And until all that happens, the aides say, nothing can move forward.

“It’s not settled,” Sheppard said. “There’s a lot left to be done.”

Although the parking lot closed five years ago and the latest conflict has been brewing since late last year, Sheppard said questions about it were “a little premature.”

But if Walters has opposed the primary center--as another aide said she has, and as Walters has let both Riordan aides and local merchants believe--then why not go ahead and open the parking lot?

“We have to have a study by [the city Department of Transportation] to figure out how many spaces it needs,” said Walters’ aide Flad. Told that the lot already was striped for spaces and ready for cars--all it needs is for someone to unlock the gate--Flad said she could not explain that.

Rather, she and others close to the process say Walters’ opposition to the school centers largely around an enticing alternative: that a major developer might be lured to the intersection of Vermont and Slauson Avenue by another vacant lot across the street from the parking lot. In that scenario, a supermarket, drugstore or other retailer might set up shop on the larger parcel, block off a portion of 58th Street and connect that property to the disputed parking lot.

That would help further the promising developments at that intersection, where a mall with a supermarket and chain drugstore on the opposite corner already provides bustling service to the community.