CRA Commissioner Resigns in Wake of Buyout Controversy : City Hall: Her support for $1.7-million retirement deal had cast her reappointment into doubt.

Community Redevelopment Agency Commissioner Dollie Chapman resigned Friday after her reappointment to the powerful commission was thrown into doubt by the controversy over the $1.7-million buyout of CRA administrator John Tuite.

Mayor Tom Bradley’s office announced her resignation five days after a City Council committee unanimously voted against the mayor’s proposed reappointment of Chapman, who has served since 1984.

“The current climate has convinced me that it no longer makes sense for me to serve as a CRA commissioner,” Chapman said in a resignation letter to Bradley. She added that “the kind of community cooperation” the CRA needs “currently (is) lacking in the halls of local government.”

Chapman could not be reached for comment.

Bradley, who has been in Hawaii attending a conference since Sunday, also could not be reached for comment. But a spokesman for the mayor said, “The decision (to resign) was totally up to Ms. Chapman.”

The Tuite retirement package, the richest in city history, has provoked public and council condemnation. The mayor has said it was negotiated by his appointees to the CRA commission without his knowledge of the total cost.

City Councilwoman Gloria Molina, chairwoman of the committee that voted to oust Chapman, said, “She probably saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to resign.” Molina said committee members were upset with Chapman’s defense of the Tuite buyout.

Council President John Ferraro said Chapman “used good judgment in resigning.”

The council committee had exercised its limited oversight powers Monday, when it voted unanimously against reappointing Chapman. Some city officials predicted that the council would soon vote to block Chapman’s reappointment.

One indication of the trouble Chapman’s reappointment faced was that Councilman Richard Alatorre, a key Bradley ally, joined in the committee vote against her.

Angry committee members had pressed Chapman to explain the deal with Tuite. “What you don’t seem to understand,” Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky told her, “is that somebody has to be held accountable for one of the most outrageous decisions ever made by a public agency in the history of this country.”

Chapman, an interior decorator, also is one of several Bradley commissioners under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and the district attorney’s office for possible conflicts of interest involving fund raising for the mayor, according to a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner. Chapman has denied any wrongdoing.

Bradley’s office announced that Chapman will be replaced on the CRA commission by former developer lobbyist Norman Emerson, who also has been a planning manager for Atlantic Richfield Co., a special assistant to the secretary of transportation in the Administration of former President Jimmy Carter and a former board member of the Southern California Rapid Transit District.