Northeast Valley and the CRA

* The Times editorial, “How Not To Mend A City,” June 11, stated that the naysayers haven’t offered any ideas to help the impoverished northeast Valley without redevelopment.

We “naysayers” have plenty of ideas on how to help the impoverished areas. We have tried for months to offer them. But the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), the council office and the Project Area Committee (PAC) pushed their own agenda and did not provide us a chance to present our ideas. The PAC refused to discuss the CRA’s redevelopment plan or ways to make it acceptable.

We have language for the redevelopment plan that would make it more efficient and acceptable.

We have another plan that would increase property values immediately, providing instant wealth to current property owners and immediate profits for developers, with no overhead or waste of public funds. New development, including housing, would pencil out and entice new investment immediately.

All of the property tax money would continue to flow to the county and school districts. Please, just how would you suggest we offer our ideas and to whom?

DON LIPPMAN

Los Angeles

* How unfortunate that the carefully orchestrated efforts of Councilman Alex Padilla and the CRA to manipulate the June PAC meeting were frustrated by the overflowing crowd of hundreds of people from his community who wanted answers and information about the mystery redevelopment plan that he and the agency wanted to be approved. Even Padilla’s divisive tactics of appealing to residents with the promise of more public housing for the people of Pacoima could not overcome the greater community’s fears about losing control over their businesses, property and homes, and the loss of property tax revenues to the CRA, if a redevelopment project were adopted. Neither his handpicked supporters from the audience nor the adulation of “his” PAC members were able to overcome the sham and subterfuge that have characterized the promotion of this proposed new project. Perhaps this explains why the CRA prefers to work with a rubber-stamp PAC, which does not ask the important questions that the community keeps asking, to no avail, and which Padilla avoided by leaving the meeting early.

GLENN W. HOIBY

Member, North Hollywood PAC, Elected Candidate to

Northeast Valley PAC

Burbank