$11.3 Million in Grants, Jobs for L.A. Unveiled : Riots: The package will pay low-income residents to work in national forests. Funds will also help establish urban gardens.

Standing near a lush garden of corn, squash, tomatoes and bell peppers in the heart of the riot-stricken Pico-Union District, a top U.S. Agriculture Department official and Rebuild L.A. Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth unveiled an $11.3-million package of jobs and grants Thursday aimed at helping low-income residents.

One element of the package--worth $5.8 million--will pay for 550 summer jobs in Southern California’s national forests, said Ann M. Veneman, deputy secretary of agriculture and a member of President Bush’s Task Force on Los Angeles Recovery.

“While some of these new Forest Service employees will do clerical work and others will do maintenance and repair work, most will be clearing trails and working on fire prevention projects,” Veneman said.

Rebuild L.A. will help recruit youths for the jobs, which will last 90 days.

Further, the Agriculture Department will provide up to $2.75 million in matching funds for grants to community organizations to establish and maintain urban gardens and train people to work in them.

“This could be anything from planting a tree to improving an existing green area, beautifying a schoolyard or play area or even training people in greening skills so that they can take advantage of the jobs available in this field,” Veneman said.

As part of this initiative, the department’s Los Angeles County Extension Service will establish 10 new community gardens, benefiting 200 families. Another 15 children’s gardens will be established in conjunction with schools. The Agriculture Department’s contribution will depend on how much Rebuild L.A. raises for the program.

The federal funds for the initiatives were reallocated from other USDA programs--primarily a Forest Service salary account, according to a government official. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, environmental organizations have been urging the department to boost such efforts, said Andy Lipkis, founder of TreePeople, a 20,000-member volunteer organization that plants trees in open spaces in Los Angeles.

Veneman praised Ueberroth for “planting the seed” for the initiative. When he first met with the presidential task force several weeks ago, Ueberroth “told me he didn’t just want to rebuild L.A., he wanted to bring beauty and greenery to neighborhoods where that has been lacking,” she said.

Ueberroth, a frequent critic of government bureaucracy, praised the Agriculture Department for moving swiftly to set up the new programs. “There wasn’t a big debate,” he said. “It didn’t take six months or six years.”

In a letter dated Monday, Ueberroth was criticized by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) and others for not placing a representative of an environmental organization on Rebuild L.A.’s board. Ueberroth said Thursday that he had not received the letter.

In meetings this week with the federal task force, Ueberroth has outlined an approach to urban problems that dovetails with Thursday’s announcement.

“Clearly, the philosophy that is being applied by Peter Ueberroth is that the grand-scale approach is not going to work,” task force co-chairman Alfred A. DelliBovi said.

“You have to take a lot of little success stories and replicate them,” said DelliBovi, deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “I really believe as it becomes successful, other cities are going to come here to learn from this model.”

In the meantime, he acknowledged, “it has the problem in the short term of people saying where are the results.”

DelliBovi said Ueberroth has told government officials “he can create a lot of jobs in the private sector if the federal government can provide tax incentives” and if state government can ease the burden of workers’ compensation insurance and other costs of doing business.

The nature of federal aid “will depend on the very specific types of businesses that Rebuild L.A. comes up with,” DelliBovi said. The federal government, he explained, will tailor aid packages for specific businesses lured to the inner city by Rebuild L.A.

The city’s Housing Preservation and Production Department announced an initiative Thursday to create 1,000 jobs in the building trades by speeding up housing construction and rehabilitation.

Loans that would have been made over 18 months to low-income residents and minority contractors will be processed in half that time, said Gary Squier, general manager of the housing agency. The low-interest loans--some with deferred payments--are for apartment and home construction and for housing rehabilitation.

“This is employment that would happen anyway,” Squier said, “but we are just trying to move around the clock so it will happen this summer or fall and we can resolve some problems the city is in.”

Times staff writer James Rainey contributed to this story.

BACKGROUND

For information about Agriculture Department summer jobs, call (818) 952-5074. Applications should be mailed or delivered by July 6 to the Federal Job Information Center, 9650 Flair Drive, Suite 100 A, El Monte, Calif. 91731-3008, Attention: CEM; or Angeles National Forest, Personnel Department, 701 Santa Anita Ave., Arcadia, Calif. 91006. For information about the urban garden grants, call (213) 744-4341.