Bruce Ackerman said if his appointment as a board commissioner for the Community Redevelopment Agency is approved by the L.A. City Council, he’ll spend his time looking for ways to renovate small, specific buildings and properties that have been under-used in addition to managing larger neighborhood conversions. In conversations before the nomination was announced last week, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told Ackerman, head of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, that he hoped his background would give the board some business development expertise. “What he did say was that (the CRA) should be a tool that’s used for community benefit,” said Ackerman. “He said ‘We’re specifically asking you because we want somebody who’s got an economic development foundation and background to be on that board to make sure that we’re focused on economic prosperity as well as community benefit.” Ackerman, who was Villaraigosa’s only nominee to the board from the San Fernando Valley, said he expects to spend his first weeks of service, should the mayor’s nominees be confirmed by the City Council, getting to know his fellow commissioners and familiarizing himself with the tools in the CRA’s arsenal. Since being informed of his nomination, Ackerman has had several conversations with Villaraigosa’s Deputy Mayor for Community and Economic Development and former chief executive of the CRA Bud Ovrom about the agency’s potential. “One problem I’ve noticed with typical community redevelopment projects is that they tend to be so large and encompass such a broad area, they automatically get the surrounding neighborhoods in such an uproar if they don’t know what’s going on or there’s no decided benefit to all the neighbors,” Ackerman said. “(Ovrom) and I agreed that there ought to be a way to do a very specific project. For example, a building that was damaged by the earthquake 10 years ago, we should not have to designate a 10-block area to improve that.” He said that neighboring cities like Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena are going to be his models of effective redevelopment strategies. “They’re just absolute models of how much the communities have benefited from strategic improvements,” he said. Los Angeles, he said, has probably had fewer success stories because of the inherent problems in large cities’ bureaucracies that make improvement projects move at such a slow pace. “The NoHo Arts District is probably a perfect example,” he said. “It just kind of stood there languishing for 20 years. They moved things a little bit and got a couple of things done, but the draft from all those years ago was never fully realized. It wasn’t until (Ovrom) came in and started making a couple of changes in regard to people that things really started to move.” Children’s Museum The Children’s Museum of Los Angeles, which has struggled at times to secure donations in order to become a reality, will finally have a physical presence when it breaks ground on October 18. Three years ago, Councilman Alex Padilla steered the city toward selecting Hansen Dam as the museum’s new location, after its lease expired in downtown Los Angeles. The original plan was to buy land downtown, which ultimately turned out to be cost prohibitive. The city’s decision to offer the museum a 50-year lease on its land near Hansen Dam for $1 a foot cleared the way for the Valley to finally welcome its first major cultural institution. Since then, museum officials have had to reduce the size of the conceptual building from 72,000 square feet to about 58,000, but executive director Mark Dierking said that he expects the city to be more excited about the project once it starts going up. “We’re finished with all of our drawings, we’re finalizing building in terms of awarding the contract. We’re here. It’s happening,” Dierking said. The museum has raised a total of $30 million, and has spent about $9 million in initial plans. The remaining $21 million on hand will pay for construction costs, but Dierking said the museum still needs to raise another $17 million to pay for exhibits and a staff. Kaiser Prepares Kaiser Permanente has purchased an apartment building in Panorama City near the site of its new hospital, scheduled to open in 2007. The company has informed the residents that its initial plans are to eventually level the building and turn it into a multi-level parking structure. The company still has to navigate through the city’s entitlement process, however, and therefore can’t say for sure what the eventual fate of the building and the date of its eventual tear-down may be. Kaiser is currently completing the new hospital’s exterior, after which point it will complete work on the building functions and make preparations for the hospital switch scheduled for June of 2007. Likely Delay for Wal-Mart Wal-Mart, which is proposing to build a 156,000-square-foot store in Northridge, is running into more roadblocks. Councilman Greig Smith, who opposes the development along with the Northridge West Neighborhood Council, has asked that the city order the company to prepare a full Environmental Impact Report before beginning any construction. In making the request, Smith noted a 2004 case in which the California Appellate Court said that existing reports did not fully examine the tendency of developments to contribute to urban and suburban decay by helping to force other businesses to close. “The indication from the zoning administrator is that she’ll support that request based on the case, and Wal-Mart has suggested they’ll comply, knowing that this is a valid case” said Smith’s chief of staff Mitchell Englander. “This gives us yet another tool in our arsenal to go up against them.” The mitigated negative declaration of impact that the company initially supplied is usually a much more routine administrative approval. Englander said that it should take about six to eight months for the company to complete a full EIR. Staff Reporter Jonathan D. Colburn can be reached at (818) 316-3124 or at [email protected]
