Santa Ana to Create Panel on HUD Funds

Now that they have the money--some of it, anyway--Santa Ana officials said Monday that they will create a 22-member interim board next month to decide how the city is to spend as much as $100 million in federal money to revitalize three of its poorest neighborhoods.

Creating the board is a major step in developing an empowerment zone for the neighborhoods because it will design the bureaucratic structure--including how the permanent board will be selected--for doling out federal money.

The board also will play a role in determining which zone-based businesses will receive as much as $130 million in low-interest loans the city is allowed to issue under its $2.6-billion empowerment zone program.

The Santa Ana City Council will be responsible for proving to the federal government that the money is going where it is supposed to, Mayor Miguel A. Pulido Jr. said.

City officials initially planned to appoint board members in the fall after completing legal steps to establish the nonprofit Empowerment Santa Ana Corp.

The schedule was moved up after U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) pledged this month to help steer the corporation’s application for nonprofit status through the Internal Revenue Service.

Board members will be nominated by July 7 by community and business organizations such as the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce, Santa Ana College and the Latino Health Access Partnership. Pulido said he will ask the city, which has one seat on the board, to appoint someone who is not an elected official to keep the process from becoming politicized.

“My goal is to, in essence, take the city out of it,” Pulido said, adding that he hopes the council will approve the corporation’s board members on July 19.

The Santa Ana Police Department also has a seat on the board, as does the Orange County Board of Supervisors and the Orange County Transportation Authority.

While the organizations must be represented on the corporation’s board, the City Council must ratify the nominations, said Aldo Schindler, the empowerment zone’s general manager.

How much work the board ultimately will do, though, remains uncertain. Although the Clinton administration sought $10 million a year for 10 years for each of the 15 empowerment zones established earlier this year, Congress approved only $3 million per zone and only for the first year. The Clinton administration is expected to seek funding for the remaining years in the next budget.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo visited Santa Ana on Monday to sign documents with city officials freeing up the initial $3 million. About $400,000 will go for administrative costs, $386,000 to after-school youth programs, $76,500 for health outreach programs and $250,000 to help establish a One Stop Capital Shop for matching small businesses with commercial lenders.

The rest of the funds will be assigned to programs in the coming months, Schindler said.

Cuomo also took a brief walking tour of Minnie Street, considered by Santa Ana officials to be the most impoverished and crime-ridden section of the city, and a driving tour of portions of the rest of the zone, comprising three neighborhoods in central and southeastern Santa Ana.

The tour concluded with a 40-minute program before about 75 business and community leaders gathered at Pio Pico Elementary School.

Rifka Hirsch, of Cambodian Family, which helps Southeast Asian immigrants, told Cuomo that recurring needs for impoverished families in the zone are education, English classes and after-school programs to help divert teens from the streets.

“Otherwise, they will fall into the temptations of the neighborhood, which is not very good,” she said, adding that many in the community remain skeptical about the zone’s potential effect. “The community has been disappointed too many times in the past by the big people,” she said.

Cuomo said the strength of empowerment zones lies in their structure. By relying on people from the neighborhoods to define their own problems and possible solutions, he said, the zones reverse traditional top-down governmental approaches to social problems.

“The empowerment zones concept is very much listening to the communities and doing what the communities want done,” he said.

Cuomo was in Santa Ana as part of a three-city swing to review programs receiving HUD funding. In Santa Monica, he attended the morning groundbreaking for new housing for the elderly. In the afternoon he went to Mecca, on the north shore of the Salton Sea, to announce $800,000 in new HUD grants for housing and community development projects.

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Zone Is a First

Santa Ana Monday received $3 million from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development as the first installment of a projected 10-year, $100 million federal Empowerment Zone plan to revive three neighborhoods. The city also announced that it hopes to have the Zone’s board of directors in place by July 19. Despite the progress, the U.S. Congress has not approved funding for the next nine years of the program.