Tuite Urged Project OK in Letters to Officials : Investigations: The redevelopment agency chief is a former paid consultant for Sheridan Manor, which won a $600,000 loan from the city.

During his tenure as head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, John Tuite sent letters to the Los Angeles City Council and the mayor’s office urging approval of a CRA project for which he had once been a paid lobbyist, The Times has learned.

The two letters, written in April, 1988, recommend council approval of a $600,000 CRA loan for the Sheridan Manor housing project, now the subject of a Los Angeles Police Department corruption investigation.

Informants have alleged that the bidding on the project was rigged and that city officials were given campaign contributions for their assistance in moving the project through the bureaucracy.

Tuite, who worked for the project’s developers before taking over as CRA administrator in 1986, could not be found Friday afternoon, according to Marc Littman, a CRA spokesman. Tuite, who remains head of the CRA until April, recently agreed to step down after negotiating a controversial $1.7-million severance package.

Littman said neither he nor other CRA officials could explain on Friday why Tuite signed the letters. Tuite, he said, has been “shielded from” all aspects of the project and made no decisions about it because of his previous work as a consultant for the winning bidders.

Littman speculated that Tuite may have signed the two letters inadvertently as routine matters that came across his desk.

A number of other CRA documents recommending official actions about Sheridan Manor are signed by deputy administrators acting in place of Tuite. The documents contain notations about Tuite’s connection with the project and say that Tuite “has not participated in any deliberations or otherwise influenced” CRA decisions.

The letters obtained by The Times describe the project in detail and spell out the actions that Tuite and the agency requested of the council. Tuite concluded the letter to the council by saying: “We respectfully request that this important project receive your earliest consideration and approval.”

Sheridan Manor is a 162-unit low-income housing project at two locations in the central city that have been renovated with financial assistance from the CRA. Once scheduled for demolition by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the buildings were saved through the intervention of Mayor Tom Bradley and other local officials and turned over to the CRA.

In the mid-1980s, after leaving a job at the local HUD office, Tuite became a consultant and was hired by entrepreneur Harold Washington and Sheridan Manor Associates, who were trying to win the right to redevelop the project. He was hired to head the CRA in 1986.

Washington said in an interview earlier this week that Tuite was paid between $30,000 and $60,000 to lobby for Sheridan Manor and other projects in the year before taking the CRA job.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who was instrumental in a recent move to give the council greater control over the CRA, said Friday that Tuite’s letter may indicate an ethical lapse.

“I don’t know whether there’s any legal violation,” Yaroslavsky said, but it “would have probably been the better part of valor for him not to have involved himself at all.”

The letters “appear to be at variance with prior contentions that he was not involved in this project once he came to the CRA,” he said.

Under the state Fair Political Practices Act and the city’s new ethics law, which is not retroactive, city officials are barred from participating in decisions involving former employers for a one-year period. The city attorney’s office declined to comment on Tuite’s case.

The circumstances surrounding the approval of the Sheridan Manor project are under investigation as part of a wide-ranging political corruption probe detailed in a lengthy search warrant affidavit filed recently in Municipal Court.

Through spokesmen, Tuite has denied any wrongdoing in the matter.