HOLLYWOOD: Opposing Visions of the Future : Two civic leaders with strongly held views symbolize the continuing struggle over how a community can best serve its people and business. : BILL WELSH: He says he wants to repay Hollywood for a wonderful life.

As Hollywood’s $922-million redevelopment project gets under way, two camps are battling over the historic community. Big-business interests, led by Bill Welsh and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, have been pushing for tall new buildings and extensive commercial development. But many merchants and homeowners, represented by cafe owner Doreet Rotman, are fighting for smaller-scale development to preserve more of the community’s small shops, comfortable neighborhoods and historic landmarks.

Bill Welsh, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, spends virtually every day painting a bright future for the old film capital.

He visits church groups, service clubs and homeowners meetings, often drawing raves.

“If you ever hear him speak on Hollywood, he’s fantastic,” said Chris Shabel, head of the Greater Hollywood Civic Assn. and a member of the Coalition of Concerned Hollywood Neighborhood Organizations. “You really feel uplifted.”

But as he makes his rounds, Welsh quietly notes the grim decay. Around every corner are old buildings, boarded-up buildings, buildings that stand as tombstones to Hollywood’s once-thriving business community.

“Some of those buildings ought to come down before 5 o’clock tonight, because maybe an earthquake’s going to hit at 6 o’clock and kill people in those buildings,” Welsh said. “The deterioration of a business community is like a cancer. It just continues to spread.”

Founding Father

Welsh, who hopes to stop that spread, is one of the founding fathers and leading supporters of Hollywood’s $922-million redevelopment plan, adopted by the Los Angeles City Council last May. It was Welsh and the chamber who helped launch the effort, raising $150,000 for a crucial feasibility study in 1983, and it was Welsh and other chamber members who played central roles in writing the plan.

Now, Welsh is in a powerful position to help shape the 30-year future of the project, influencing what can be built, and where, and what it will look like. As the voice and key representative of the business community, he leads the battle against the plan’s many critics--critics who say it allows for too much large-scale development, who say small merchants and residents will be vulnerable to eviction and property condemnation, who say any number of historic landmarks may fall to the bulldozers.

“I think it’s an accepted fact that if you’re not moving ahead, you’re falling back, you’re losing ground,” Welsh said, looking ahead to the possibility of swank new hotels, restaurants and gleaming office towers on Hollywood Boulevard. “I think (redevelopment) is going to be so well done that even our loudest critics . . . are going to say, ‘I don’t know why I opposed it. . . . It turned out to be wonderful.’

“They’re going to like these buildings, they’re going to like the kind of people they see, and they’re going to like the new businesses they have.”

Despite two lawsuits and three years of bitter controversy over redevelopment, Welsh talks with easy confidence of the rewards to be had. He says commercial growth will spawn new jobs, new housing, new social programs for residents of all income ranges.

Articulate, dapper and politically connected, Welsh was a small-town boy from Greeley, Colo., who found fame as a Hollywood radio and television broadcaster. In 1944, he was just a part-time newscaster at KFKA radio in Greeley, earning $7 a week. A few years later, he was televising USC and UCLA football games and the Tournament of Roses Parade--an event he handled Thursday for the 40th successive year.

He tends to paint his vision for Hollywood, to paint even his own life, with the pomp and color of a parade broadcast. “I’ve had a fantastic life in Hollywood,” says Welsh, who actually lives in Westlake Village and drives more than an hour each day to reach the chamber offices at Hollywood and Vine.

“I had a good fortune to get into television in 1946; I grew up with the industry. I’ve had a wonderful life, all because of Hollywood. Now I want to put something back in. When I get older, I want to be able to look out this window--or some window--and say, ‘You know, we got a better community because a lot of people believed in it, and I was one of the people who believed in it.’ ”

Commanding View

From his cluttered desk on the fifth floor of an office tower, Welsh commands a panorama of Sunset Boulevard parking lots and commercial buildings, many of them owned by chamber members. He can look to the hillside and see the gleaming white HOLLYWOOD sign, refurbished by the chamber in 1978, two years before he ascended from chamber director to president.

Welsh works for redevelopment on two fronts: as a recruiter for the chamber, trying to attract new members to a once-dying business community, and as a representative of the Project Area Committee, or PAC, a state-mandated citizens group formed in 1983 to help write and put into effect the redevelopment plan.

Chamber membership has risen to 1,500 in the past year, a 25% increase, Welsh said. In a few months, he hopes to add two more employees to his 14-person staff to keep up with the expansion. Overall interest in Hollywood has risen sharply since the community hit bottom about 10 years ago, he said.

Business officials “are asking, ‘How can I move into Hollywood?’ ” Welsh said. “Across this desk, about every day, goes a request from somebody: ‘Where can I find a building this size or where can I find offices with that much floor space?’ People are looking at Hollywood because of this redevelopment project and saying, ‘Maybe I’d like to be there.’ ”

But the chamber has drawn fire for its role in writing the redevelopment plan. Welsh, an original member of the PAC, is one of 12 chamber officers or directors who now sit on the 25-member committee, which has played a key role in shaping the language and interpretation of the plan.

Critics of redevelopment, including several individuals who have filed suit to overturn the plan, charge that Welsh and former Hollywood-area Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson conspired to exclude non-business interests from the planning for redevelopment. They charge that chamber officials were able to dominate the committee to write a plan mostly favorable to big business.

‘That’s Ridiculous’

Welsh vehemently denies the charges.

“That’s ridiculous--absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “We never met (among ourselves) to decide what the plan would be. We never involved ourselves in any coordinated planning. As far as the chamber and the Community Redevelopment Agency sitting down to discuss anything (about the plan), it never happened.”

Yet the committee’s draft of the plan was regarded as heavily pro-development by Los Angeles Councilman Michael Woo, who was elected to office as the document neared a climactic City Council vote. Woo, at the last minute, tightened building limits on Hollywood Boulevard, allocated money for social-service programs and established controls for preserving historic landmarks.

Each of those changes ran contrary to the wishes of chamber members. In an interview, Woo recalled Welsh’s anger when 10% of the expected redevelopment revenues were set aside for social programs such as child care and aid to the homeless.

Woo said Welsh “literally called me at 7 o’clock in the morning” to protest. “He got very upset. . . . I won’t say he yelled, (but) he was more upset with me than he’s ever been in the whole time I’ve known him.”

The business community, led by Welsh and then-PAC Chairman Marshall Caskey, an honorary chamber director, had fought an earlier proposal for a 1% allocation.

Welsh maintains that there was a good reason for protesting. Redevelopment efforts invariably result in funding for social programs, he said, in amounts that are set as the money is needed. Almost always those amounts turn out to exceed 10% of the available revenues, he said.

‘Wrong Way to Do It’

“My concern was, if you say 10% . . . you set a ceiling on it,” Welsh said. “By setting a figure, you set a ceiling. I felt it was the wrong way to do it.”

Diana Bradford Webb, project manager for the Community Redevelopment Agency, which oversees the 1,100-acre Hollywood project and 16 other redevelopment areas in Los Angeles, said a number of officials shared that concern.

Yet the critics remain skeptical. Former PAC member Fran Offenhauser, a professional urban planner and a member of the preservationist group Hollywood Heritage, said chamber members were interested in no more than an “off-the-shelf” redevelopment plan that would do little more than set up a basic framework for action.

Details considered vital by many community groups were simply ignored by the chamber majority on the PAC, Offenhauser said.

“What Bill Welsh represented was a plan at any price--just get the plan done,” she said. “There were those of us who felt that was not a legitimate goal; that the goal (should be) to do a decent job of planning.

“He really wasn’t that concerned about what the content was.”

Brian Moore, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. and a former PAC member, was even more critical. He said Welsh “seems to have his own private agenda . . . some kind of strange image of Hollywood of his own making, and he’s not shared it completely with anybody. We’re trying to get specific and he doesn’t want to get specific.”

Welsh says there is nothing at all private or strange about his goals. What he wants to see, Welsh said, are the preservation of beautiful or historic buildings, the construction of buildings that will attract new business, and better housing for residents of all economic groups.

Unwarranted Fears

He said many residents share unwarranted fears of redevelopment. They are fearful that it will bring wholesale property condemnation and mass evictions, fearful that developers will build a wall of high-rise towers along Hollywood Boulevard.

“The rumors we have to fight are unbelievable,” Welsh said. “Some people thought we were going to line up 100 bulldozers at the Hollywood Freeway and start west and mow down everything until we got to La Brea (Avenue). Somebody said we were planning a series of 80-story buildings along Hollywood Boulevard.

“Some people believed that. There’s no way an 80-story building would be economically sound in Hollywood. You just can’t do it.”

Zoning standards sought by the chamber would have allowed high-density development, but “not likely . . . at 80-story heights,” redevelopment official Webb said. “It probably would have been much lower,” she said, and actual heights might have varied widely depending upon market conditions and lot sizes.

As it was, Woo’s last-minute zoning changes greatly reduced allowable construction--but to levels that many community members still find objectionable. The tallest buildings in the $150-million Melvin Simon project, the first major commercial project to be proposed since the adoption of the redevelopment plan, have been limited to 235 feet--about 22 stories--only because developers agreed to scale back original designs for a 385-foot office tower and a 300-foot hotel.

That project, to cover eight acres adjacent to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, is expected to break ground this year.

“We’re so lucky to have someone like Simon come in here,” Welsh said. “We supported higher densities, greater height limits (on Hollywood Boulevard). But we realized if we were going to be a united community we had to give some. We thought . . . ‘If that will keep everybody happy, let’s do it,’ as long as we don’t reduce it so much the developers say, ‘I don’t want any part of it.’

“That’s the only part that ever concerned me . . . that we could have chased away developers.”

Pivotal Role

Former PAC Chairman Caskey, who still sits on the committee, said Welsh played a pivotal role in persuading big-business interests to compromise on building limits, rather than fight what seemed to be a growing political tide against large-scale growth throughout Los Angeles. Welsh easily could have enhanced his reputation in the business community by urging such a fight, Caskey said.

“Bill is definitely not some drone . . . for the Chamber of Commerce,” Caskey said. “There is some pressure on Bill . . . to achieve a more successful business climate in Hollywood, (but) Bill is big enough to be immune to certain kinds of pressure. I don’t think anybody, strictly speaking, tells Bill exactly what to do.

“Bill fights very hard for his point of view. (But) once the majority speaks and a vote is taken, he supports the majority position. He does not . . . restate his point to the point of endless redundancy.”

Welsh talks proudly about his role in launching the redevelopment project. When city officials said a $150,000 planning study would be needed before Hollywood could qualify as a redevelopment area, Welsh convened about 75 wealthy businessmen, most of them chamber members, for a fund-raising luncheon at the now-demolished Brown Derby restaurant.

The speakers were Welsh, former Councilwoman Stevenson and Edward Helfeld, former director of the Community Redevelopment Agency. Pledges totaled $62,500 by the end of dessert and coffee, Welsh said.

$150,000 in 60 Days

“The chamber took over the remainder of the job and we ended up, probably in about 60 days, with $150,000,” he said. “I got on the phone with a list of potential donors, asking for $5,000, asking for $10,000, asking for $1,000--and getting it. It finally came in, and I very proudly carried down a bunch of checks and handed them over to Ed Helfeld, and that was that.”

Bill Maxson, owner of Millers Stationers and Printers on La Brea Avenue near Hollywood Boulevard, said members of the business community appreciate Welsh’s stature. “Just because of his name, his reputation, he is able to focus attention on a problem,” Maxson said. “He’s a hard worker; he cares about Hollywood.”

Welsh is also involved in fund-raising efforts to clean and restore the historic Walk of Fame, whose 1,800 cement-and-marble stars have suffered years of chipping and staining. Royalties are beginning to trickle in from the sales of celebrity T-shirts, coffee mugs and Hollywood candy bars, whose package sports the one-and-only HOLLYWOOD sign.

“We wrote a letter to 200 of the people who have stars on the Walk of Fame . . . asking permission to use their names and a reproduction of their stars,” Welsh said. So far, he said, 180 of them have agreed. “In one morning, we got a letter from the attorney for Frank Sinatra saying go ahead,” Welsh said, “and 10 minutes later we got a phone call from the agent for Elizabeth Taylor . . . saying she was going to sign the form.

Will Stay on Job

“That’s the kind of response we’ve had.”

His duties with the chamber leave him with only about 15 hours a week for his work with KTTV (Channel 11), Welsh said. But he vows to keep the chamber job “until somebody tells me, ‘Hey, that’s enough.’

“I don’t see any lessening of my energy or commitment,” Welsh said.

Early last year, he said, he dragged out a book on Hollywood, looking for photographs from the 1940s--the war years--when he first came west. In those old pictures, Welsh said, he could see how the Hollywood Boulevard of the past compared with Hollywood Boulevard now.

He said the only difference on the stretch between Highland Avenue and the Hollywood Freeway is that the street cars are gone.

“Every building in that whole area was there before World War II. You can’t maintain a community that way. You cannot keep putting a new roof on old buildings or shoring up walls or things like that; you have got to bring in some new construction.”