Fund Northeast Valley Projects

Mayor Richard Riordan’s plan for spending $175 million in federal funds includes money for much-needed low-income housing, after-school programs and a range of other worthy proposals that the City Council will consider over the next weeks. Need will no doubt exceed funding, and debate over which proposals--or which districts--are more deserving is inevitable. But two northeast San Fernando Valley projects stand out as more than deserving: $500,000 for a jobs-training program in Pacoima and $1 million for a long-delayed branch library in Lake View Terrace.

In the fall, the Los Angeles City Council declined to include Pacoima in its application for a multimillion-dollar federal youth job-training grant for Watts and East L.A. Pacoima was technically eligible, but the council--over Pacoima Councilman Alex Padilla’s objections--decided that to include the Valley community would have made the application less competitive because the grant favored areas with concentrated poverty rates, as well as those with already established job-training programs.

A grant that targets only the kind of high-density poverty found in inner cities is out of touch with changes in older suburbs like the Valley. Just because the suburbs are geographically more sprawling and their poverty less concentrated doesn’t make their poor any less in need of education and job training.

But while such misperceptions can’t be changed--at least not immediately--the city can find other sources of funding, such as the mayor’s proposal. The $500,000 program would not only provide job training for Pacoima residents ages 16 to 24, it would make the community more competitive for future federal grants--giving the council more bang for the bucks it spends now.

As for the library in Lake View Terrace, a Los Angeles library master plan identified the need for a library there a dozen years ago. A generation of Lake View Terrace kids have grown up and graduated from school without the benefit of such a basic community resource.

One cause of the delay has been the library’s design. Its energy-efficient, eco-friendly features, although laudable, ended up costing more than the construction funds available.

Padilla oversaw an effort to scale back the design, without entirely abandoning its environmental features but with the goal of getting the library up and running. If the mayor’s proposal is approved, Padilla predicts that ground could be broken for a new library before the end of another libraryless year.

Padilla, who took heat for not winning a slot for Pacoima in the original grant application, deserves credit for getting the mayor to include both the job-training program and the library in his budget. But the projects deserve the full council’s support, not because of Padilla but because of the children of Pacoima and Lake View Terrace.