66 million reasons to re-examine Grand Ave.

“I don’t like it,” Merilie Robertson, a retired teacher, was saying Tuesday as she rode the Orange Line to her home in Canoga Park. “I’m always suspicious when tax breaks are given to corporations that are already very wealthy.”

She was talking about the plans to remake downtown Los Angeles with a $2-billion Grand Avenue project that will include a five-star Mandarin Hotel, a 16-acre park and 3.2-million square feet of stores, offices and housing. And judging from my conversations with her and other bus riders in the Valley, she’s not alone in smelling a rat.

Robertson doesn’t object to the idea of remaking Grand Avenue, a campaign driven by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad. Her problem is with the use of public funds -- up to $66 million in tax rebates over the next 20 years, along with free public land and other sweeteners -- to make it happen. And that’s just for Phase One of a three-phase project.

Of course, that’s practically chump change when compared to the L.A. Live project planned for the area around Staples Center, where the public giveaway is worth closer to $300 million.

“I’d like to see those public funds spent on something like housing and transportation,” Robertson said. “The joke in the San Fernando Valley is that whenever you see potholes being filled and streets being fixed, there must be another election coming up.”

Riding the same Orange Line bus was Caesar Gonzales, who commutes from Watts to Warner Center for his job at a collection agency. Gonzales takes the Blue Line to the Red Line to the Orange Line, spending 5 1/2 hours daily on buses and trains, and he said he’s all for any jobs created by the big downtown projects.

But he stopped short of endorsing a public investment in private enterprise.

“I was brought up in a tough neighborhood but was bused to good schools,” said Gonzales. “If not, I could have gotten caught up with gangs. A lot of my friends I grew up with are dead. What would I do with the money in my neighborhood? Lots of things. Stores. Movie theaters. A little promenade. Maybe if you had, like, some YMCAs.”

Along the Orange Line, which I rode from North Hollywood to the mall at Warner Center, the feelings were pretty much the same. Lots of folks seldom make it downtown at all, thanks to the disastrous planning that has led to nightmarish traffic.

“I think it’s rotten,” said Dwight Elrich, who teaches piano and wondered why the city doesn’t throw his tax dollars into building more of a cultural center in the Valley instead of downtown.

On my return bus ride, Jill Newton, a student and librarian, said she’d rather see $60 million spent to expand library hours.

“I like downtown more than I used to, but I don’t think it should be developed before other places. And it sounds more like it’s a development for tourists. A hotel is for tourists. A library is for people who live here.”

The other side puts up a pretty good argument, pointing out that successful downtown developments would create new jobs and cash streams, filling city coffers and funding the kinds of citywide services the Orange Line riders are clamoring for. They point out the developers have agreed to reserve 20% of the housing they build for low-income tenants. And they argue that the money isn’t really a giveaway: The city would simply allow the developers to keep the new hotel and parking taxes they generate for the next 20 years.

The developer, Related Cos., claims the project isn’t economically feasible without public financing, and a city audit has rubber-stamped that notion.

Call me a cynic, but I’m not buying it. This is the way the game gets played in Los Angeles, a city run by developers and mismanaged by the politicians who roll over for them.

Is it fair to the Biltmore or the Bonaventure hotels for the city to give millions in tax breaks to the operation of the Mandarin Oriental, where rooms will go for between $400 and $700 a night?

Oh, don’t worry about that, the city’s legislative analyst says. The glittering new high-end hotel won’t be competing with the lesser lights down the hill, so those shabby old-timers have nothing to fear.

Easy for him to say.

Where’s Joel Wachs when you need him?

In the 1990s, he was the lone Los Angeles city councilman who stood up to the Staples Center developers who said the deal wouldn’t pencil out without massive freebies. Only after Wachs alerted the public did they decide they could make do with less.

“It didn’t turn out that the Staples Center needed all the benefits it was after,” said Peter Dreier of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College. But as he noted, Wachs doesn’t seem to have a contemporary counterpart on the council.

“If this is going to cost taxpayers millions of dollars, tens of millions, you’d better be damn sure that you’ve got your numbers straight and this has been subjected to the most careful scrutiny from different points of view.”

Dreier’s other problem is that he doesn’t think there’s a broader plan for making the project fit any particular vision of downtown Los Angeles over the next 20 or 30 years. And he’s not alone.

“Every member of the City Council should be assigned to read ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ by Jane Jacobs,” said Ventura City Manager and former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole, who has closely followed the changes in downtown Los Angeles.

What they’d learn, he argues, is that the building and remaking of cities is a task too vital to be put in the hands of developers. Rather than invite proposals for Grand Avenue, he argues, the city should have created its own plan, at its own cost and on its own terms, and then brought in the developers to execute the will of the people.

“What are these buildings going to look like and how will they impact their surroundings? How do you get public subsidies to maximize the public benefit? When you default to major landowners and major development companies, they quite rightly and sensibly are going to design projects that keep as many of the customers inside their project as possible,” said Cole.

“Just look at the last 20 years, with Bunker Hill, the Convention Center, the Cathedral, Disney Hall, the Staples, all the major projects that were going to turn downtown L.A. around and haven’t. They work individually and they’re important, but they have to fit a plan and you have to make sure the public gets value instead of buying another pig in a poke, with someone saying the project is $50 million short.”

The Grand Avenue project comes up for votes next week by the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. I know it’s late in the game, but not too late.

It’d be nice to see somebody start asking tough questions. In fact, I’d like to see someone call the developers’ bluff and tell Related Cos. to take a hike if it doesn’t think the project pencils out. I’m betting another developer would step in before the week is out.

From downtown to Warner Center, what would the city have to lose?

*

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.