Council Panel OKs $1-Million Van Nuys Grant

The Van Nuys government office center and its surrounding neighborhood would receive $1 million for improvements under a proposed community-development budget approved by a Los Angeles City Council committee Monday.

The unanimous vote by six council members represented a hard-fought compromise over how to spend $109 million in federal community block grants for the budget year beginning July 1.

The committee first proposed cutting some funds from the improvement program for Van Nuys, but decided at its final meeting before sending the budget to the full City Council that the program should stay intact.

“This particular community is highly in need,” said Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who represents Van Nuys. “Clearly, some parts of Van Nuys are terrific, but we want to bring it all up to that level.”

The Van Nuys program is just one small part of the whole block-grant budget--a significant source of funding for city housing and social service programs.

In recent years, there has been controversy over shifting some of this money away from traditional housing programs into newer programs such as gap-funding for businesses and targeted neighborhoods.

“Every year this budget is smaller and smaller” and demand for it greater, said City Councilman Mike Hernandez, chairman of the committee.

Negotiations were especially long and intense this year because requests for block grant funds from city departments were greater and historic reserves have been depleted.

Also, various other federal grant programs related to post-riot and and post-Northridge earthquake recovery have ended, leaving fewer alternate funding sources, Hernandez said.

So late last week, there remained a $5.4-million gap in the budgets. Committee members, seeking to make up the deficit, had proposed cutting $700,000 from the Van Nuys program put forth by Mayor Richard Riordan.

But Monday, following a hectic weekend of number-crunching by city budget analysts, the committee members agreed to restore the Van Nuys funding, part of the mayor’s targeted neighborhood initiative already operating in 11 areas of the city.

The targeted neighborhood program provides local groups with money to leverage with private-sector dollars to pay for an array of improvements, from street beautification to housing.

Also preserved in the budget proposal is a handful of programs proposed by the mayor to spur economic development in the city, including a $5-million equity and investment fund to stimulate business. The mayor had proposed spending $10.7 million, but the committee scaled the total back to $9.6 million. The proposal still represents an increase over last year’s economic development allocation.

The committee restored the items partly because city budget analysts came up with some last-minute savings from other programs.

City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg praised the analysts’ efforts at the discussion’s close, calling them magicians. The committee’s vote was punctuated by brief applause from the assembled group of bureaucrats and advocates.

Final action on the proposed budget is expected by the full council Wednesday, just two days before the federal government’s deadline to submit the grant requests.