Northeast Valley’s Advisory Panel Disbands

In a surprise move, members of a city advisory panel on northeast San Fernando Valley redevelopment voted to disband Monday night, saying they were hopelessly gridlocked.

The 12-4 vote came at a raucous public hearing at the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley.

Police handcuffed three people after a fistfight broke out during the debate, but all three were later released without arrest.

Critics said the Project Advisory Committee had become an impediment to redevelopment, becoming the vehicle for endless debate. Moreover, they said the panel would not be legally needed as long as the city agrees not to use its eminent domain powers to acquire residential land in the redevelopment area.

“This PAC has been meeting for six months, and this PAC has been unproductive--mostly because of outsiders who have come in, scaring people about eminent domain,” said Joe Lopez, a member of the committee.

Lopez moved to disband the panel after Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla said he has introduced legislation that would bar the Community Redevelopment Agency from using eminent domain to condemn residential property.

But another PAC member, Esther Delguadio, complained that without the panel, Padilla would ram redevelopment through over any and all opposition.

“If you dissolve the PAC, they will go ahead and do what they want to do,” she said before the vote.

Padilla spokesman David Gershwin said the councilman will support disbanding the panel, which would require City Council approval. But Padilla plans to continue seeking community input, and would appoint an informal advisory panel if the PAC is dissolved, Gershwin said.

The PAC “hasn’t been able to address the needs of the community,” Gershwin said. “It has been bogged down by divisiveness.”

During the debate, a fight broke out as Michael Trujillo was speaking against the redevelopment program. Trujillo, a former member of the city Commission for Children, Youth and Family, was one of three people briefly detained by police in the scuffle that followed.

The PAC had been scheduled to discuss a proposal to shrink the size of the proposed redevelopment project from 6,835 acres to about 3,400 acres by excluding large sectors of the northeast Valley that have either developed on their own in the last couple of years or cannot be developed.

“Some of these boundaries were not well thought out,” said Carol Silver, vice chairwoman of the citizens panel, which was set up by the city and elected at large by the community.

But after three hours of debate, the panel took no action on the proposal to reduce the area and instead voted to disband.

Any decision to scale back the area would have to be approved by the city Planning Commission and the City Council.

Even at 3,400 acres, the northeast project area would be the largest of the more than 30 project areas in Los Angeles. Under redevelopment, the city can take the property tax money generated by increasing property values in an area and use it to provide financial subsidies, such as land-purchase write-downs, as incentives for further development.