Panel Backs $2 Million for Lankershim Beautification

North Hollywood merchants who lost business during the construction of the Red Line subway will benefit from $2 million to spruce up Lankershim Boulevard under a plan endorsed Friday by a City Council panel.

The Transportation Committee recommended that $2 million in transit taxes go toward creation of a Business Improvement District proposed for a stretch of Lankershim Boulevard between Burbank Boulevard and Riverside Drive, as well as a few cross streets along that stretch. The full council is scheduled to act next week.

“This money will help those merchants who really suffered during the subway construction to now take advantage of the fact that there is going to be a transit station there and put them back on the map,” said Councilman Joel Wachs, who helped spearhead the effort.

Wachs noted that the infusion of transit dollars will make the proposed North Hollywood district the second wealthiest in the city after downtown.

“This is excellent. It’s something we’ve been looking for for quite some time,” said Ken Banks, a representative of the more than 100 merchants involved.

Building a subway connecting North Hollywood to downtown required the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to dig up and close sections of Lankershim intermittently over the past few years, resulting in steep drops in business for many merchants.

Some businesses folded. Others hung on, hoping for better days when the construction ended and after the subway station opens in June.

In a report Friday to the City Council, Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton said the special attention for North Hollywood is justified by the hardship suffered during the subway construction.

“Street closures, traffic rerouting and parking displacement discouraged patrons from using the shops, theaters and restaurants in the area,” Deaton wrote.

Faced with a flood of complaints from the merchants, the City Council agreed in November 1998 to set aside $2 million to help merchants, but the proposal got tangled up in a slow-moving bureaucracy.

“We were naive,” said Guy Weddington McCreary, a local property owner and past president of the Universal City/North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Parties squabbled over how the money would be disbursed. Finally, the merchants and city officials agreed on creation of a Business Improvement District, which would have a governing board made up of local business people to oversee the use of the funds.

“It’s taken a long time,” McCreary said. “This is a great breakthrough.”

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Since 1994, Los Angeles has helped set up 25 Business Improvement Districts, which are formal alliances of merchants who agree to tax themselves to pay for additional improvements to their streets.

In other cases, merchants have used the money for landscaping, cleaning sidewalks, hiring extra security, and marketing programs. Many districts generate less than $100,000 a year.

The North Hollywood district can adopt a more ambitious program, including sprucing up storefronts, and advertising campaigns to bring more pedestrians to central North Hollywood.

Proponents are confident merchants will join the effort, because the transit tax money will allow them to set the assessments far below what other commercial districts are paying, Banks said.

Wachs said the district will allow merchants, not the MTA or the Community Redevelopment Agency, to spend the money.

“We don’t want the money all frittered away,” Wachs said. “This way, it will be up to the merchants to decide how best to spend the money.”