Where Was Hernandez?

When he explains his alcoholism and arrest for cocaine possession, Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez likes to say drugs and booze never prevented him from doing a good job.

Hernandez and his defenders say he has continued to perform well as a strong voice for his district, a tireless fighter for residents in a largely poor and working-class area that doesn’t have the political clout of more affluent areas.

But members of a grass-roots planning group that the councilman appointed don’t agree.

The Northeast Los Angeles Citizens Planning Advisory Committee members say that Hernandez has been an absentee lawmaker while a developer speeds ahead with plans to demolish the beloved and historic Lawry’s restaurant site and replace it with a discount chain store.

The dispute gets to the heart of the controversy over whether Hernandez was doing his job in the months before his arrest revealed his drug and alcohol addictions.

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Lawry’s was a sprawling restaurant with a big courtyard designed in a poor imitation of Spanish colonial architecture. Sitting on the patio, having a drink and waiting for dinner on a summer’s night was a pleasant L.A. experience. But a few years ago, the place went out of business. Recently, a developer, Neil Nadler, bought the property. He proposed tearing down the old restaurant building and putting up a Home Depot store.

Nadler said the Home Depot store would provide 500 jobs, many of them for residents of the adjacent working-class Cypress Park neighborhood. He promised to build three restaurants and a large patio on another part of the site to replace the old Lawry’s and to move a bell tower that was part of the original building to the new patio.

But some residents objected to the destruction of the landmark building. State Sen. Richard Polanco, who represents the area, agreed.

In fact, Polanco came up with another proposal. He said he was working with the Los Angeles Community College District, NASA and private companies to set up a visual arts academy to train people for animation, special effects and other fast-growing high-tech jobs in the film and television business.

These careers, Polanco said, would pay far more than jobs at Home Depot.

The grass-roots planning advisory committee was not included in the process.

Ed Reyes, Hernandez’s deputy in charge of planning, attended each committee meeting. “We had a standing request” for information on Lawry’s, said committee member Miki Jackson. But when the members asked him if there was anything doing at the site, Reyes said no.

Meanwhile, with Hernandez away in drug rehabilitation, his office asked Mayor Richard Riordan for help. “We were asked by the councilman to work on the project,” said Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo, who is in charge of business development for the administration.

Finally, a grass-roots committee member heard about it and alerted his colleagues, who demanded a meeting with Hernandez.

“It’s like a bunker over there,” said Jackson, a Hernandez appointee to the committee. “You call, you fax and nothing comes back. All I get out of them is silence.”

“We should have gone to them earlier and we did not,” said Reyes. “That was a big mistake.” But he insisted that “our official stand is that we’re neutral.”

The project was moving fast. Last month, the Planning Commission scheduled a hearing on it--in Sherman Oaks, miles from the Lawry’s site and its interested neighbors.

Why, a commission member wondered, were we having a hearing in the San Fernando Valley on a project near downtown. Because, a planning department staff member replied, Hernandez’s office asked that it be put on “a fast track.”

When the commission learned that the area planning committee had been kept in the dark, it postponed the hearing for a month. It will be held today.

In the end, pressure from Sen. Polanco and the grass-roots committee may force the developer to improve the project. As the committee said, the Home Depot proposal, if done right, will be good for the Cypress Park community and the city as a whole.

But if it happens, don’t thank Hernandez.

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The other day, I looked through the file on the project with a member of the Planning Department staff.

We couldn’t find any correspondence from Hernandez. What if this had been Joel Wachs’ district, I asked, or Ruth Galanter’s or any number of council members who take a personal hand in such developments. They’d be on the phone, he said, they’d be at all the meetings, they’d immerse themselves in the tough, technical boring details of city planning. They’d insist that developers spend millions to improve traffic flow, to provide community meeting rooms, child care centers and other amenities. Movie theaters are reduced in size. Designs are changed radically when council members get involved.

Hernandez likes to say that these districts get such breaks because City Hall cares more for the affluent than it does for his poor, predominantly Latino constituents.

But if Cypress Park gets stuck with a second-rate Home Depot development, don’t blame City Hall--blame Mike Hernandez.

And now that he’s clean and sober and can’t blame drugs, who will he blame?