COLUMN ONE : Ready, Willing, Unable : Eighteen months after the riots, L.A. still finds it tough to make a jobs program work. Training is not enough. The lack of openings raises questions about the commitment to rebuild.

Sporting smiles as wide as a Buick’s grille, Walter Merritt and Clarence Germany accepted their diplomas in July as members of the first graduating class of the Toyota-Urban League automotive training center in Southwest Los Angeles.

The $3-million center, created in the wake of the 1992 riots, promises jobs at car repair firms for unemployed inner-city residents who complete a free eight-week course.

Yet only three months after the hoopla-filled ceremony replete with hand-shaking politicians, beaming corporate executives and scurrying news photographers, Merritt is back looking for work. The former aerospace production supervisor quit the job he received at Montgomery Ward in Lakewood because he was never assigned more than part-time hours. “I can’t survive off of two days work a week,” Merritt, 48, said.

Germany, a former maintenance worker, is working full time at a Montgomery Ward on the Westside. But at $6 an hour, the 46-year-old father of five said, “it’s hard to make ends meet.”

“I’m hanging in there and hoping things get better.”

The Toyota training program, hailed by officials as a model partnership of corporate and community interests, symbolizes the modest successes and serious shortfalls of efforts by the public and private sectors to revitalize the economy of Los Angeles’ riot-torn neighborhoods.

Eighteen months after the civil unrest, government funding for job development has been minimal, private sector efforts have been directed more at job training than job creation and some of the highest-profile programs have not worked out as well as anticipated.

The lack of jobs in the overall economy is a major barrier, observers say. But critics also question the level of commitment in the public and private sectors.

“Are these programs useful? They obviously are useful. But obviously, they are not enough,” said management consultant Robert D. Taylor of McKinsey & Co., who last year prepared a report for Rebuild L.A. on the investment needs of revitalizing Los Angeles’ impoverished neighborhoods.

Shortly after its formation, RLA, the private agency established as the city’s primary response to the riots, pledged as its mission “to achieve change by creating new jobs, economic opportunities and pride” in neglected areas.

The need was great, according to Taylor’s estimates: an investment of about $6 billion and the creation of 75,000 to 94,000 jobs.

But to date, the state and federal governments have targeted riot recovery funds in the range of $35 million to $55 million for training and development programs in neglected neighborhoods. That is less than the No. 3 pick in this year’s professional basketball draft will receive in his long-term contract.

More than 9,000 people were thrown out of work as a result of the riots, according to the state Department of Employment Development. In contrast, the state and federally funded post-riot employment and training initiative administered by the EDD has resulted in only about 500 full-time job placements. Another 2,300 inner-city residents have received job training, classroom instruction on starting businesses or temporary part-time work, the EDD says.

Major corporations including Pioneer Electronics, IBM and Arco have established additional training programs. But few guarantee employment after graduation and most prepare students for entry-level positions that pay little more than subsistence wages.

Of the first 10 graduates of the Toyota program, half had full-time jobs less than three months later--three in auto repair. Only one was offered work at a Toyota dealership.

In studying the causes of and police response to the 1992 riots, the Webster Commission cited the lack of jobs and economic disparity in the inner city--along with drugs, crime and racial tension--as major factors in making the city “a tinderbox” that exploded when four Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty of beating Rodney G. King.

In the first 15 years after the 1965 Watts riots, the commission noted, “the federal government poured billions of dollars into community development programs.” The funds went to a panoply of jobs, training and social welfare programs that met with varying degrees of success and failure.

But times are different now.

During the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations, federal funding for job training nationally fell from $23 billion to $8 billion a year, according to the Webster Commission. Overall support for housing programs shrank 80%, community development block grants were cut 33% and general revenue sharing assistance to local governments was eliminated.

That is not to mention the toll taken by the lingering recession and staggering national debt.

Federal and state riot aid to Los Angeles has totaled about $500 million, officials say. But most of it has gone for emergency disaster loans and recovery assistance to businesses and individuals suffering riot damage.

With the downsizing of major corporations, the state’s economy in tatters and an unemployment rate hovering near 9% countywide, some economic experts believe that even if training efforts were expanded, they still would have little impact on the overwhelming problems of urban Los Angeles.

“You can spend all the money in the world on training and if there aren’t jobs, you can’t accomplish much,” said Steve Duscha, executive director of the California Employment Training Panel from 1983 to 1989. “The real truth . . . is that we don’t have a shortage of trained people--we have too many people and too few jobs. And if there are no jobs at the end of the programs, then you will further disillusion people.”

Other analysts counter that well-targeted training funds could help spur job development in neglected neighborhoods.

“There’s a mismatch in training given and jobs that are becoming available in the urban economy,” said James Johnson of the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. “One logical place is in the so-called back office job realm. Why aren’t we training people to do information processing and dissemination work in the inner city?”

In the coming year, according to a senior adviser in the U.S. Commerce Department, the Clinton Administration plans to encourage revitalization efforts through stepped-up business loan guarantees, defense conversion job training programs and the possible creation of an inner-city empowerment zone granting tax breaks to new businesses locating there.

“We don’t want to replicate the mistakes of the past . . . throwing money at the problems,” said Larry Parks, senior adviser to Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. “And we don’t just want to blame the victims.”

But one thing most experts agree on is that current spending on training and economic development says worlds about the level of commitment to boosting the economy of inner-city Los Angeles.

“The scale is not of the right scale, in either the public or private effort,” said Taylor, the consultant for RLA. “Government is us, and just reflects what we as a nation think is important. The numbers reflect a very low attention to this city.”

*

The clock has just struck noon in a cramped Inglewood storefront and Sean Allen, wearing a white shirt and black trousers, is dealing a deck of cards. The game is a variation of poker known as Hold ‘em, and as the former Navy enlistee watches the other players stroke their chips, Isadore Breaux also looks on with more than passing interest.

Breaux has no money riding on the hand. Rather, he is an instructor, and the action is taking place at “The Gaming Academy,” a new card dealers training school whose board of directors includes two politically connected former aides to retired county Supervisor Kenneth J. Hahn--James Cleaver and Brad Pye Jr.

Allen and eight other unemployed students are attending the 10-week course for free--their $2,500 tuitions paid by state riot recovery job training funds.

The goal is to prepare as many as 50 Inglewood-area residents for positions at a casino tentatively scheduled to open next year at nearby Hollywood Park racetrack, said Jan Vogel, executive director of the South Bay Private Industry Council.

Although students have received no job guarantees--indeed, permission from state authorities to open the club is still pending--each government-funded student has passed preliminary hiring hurdles such as drug tests and interviews with park officials, said Vogel, whose agency administers state and federal job training funds in Inglewood.

Training card dealers may seem a somewhat unorthodox use of riot recovery funds, he concedes. But with the lack of opportunities in manufacturing and other major industries, cards may be one of the best deals around, Vogel contends.

“Here we know to a much higher degree than with traditional training programs that they may get a job in the end,” he said.

Although a limited amount of riot recovery funds has been devoted to job development, the range of programs is quite diverse and, in some cases, eye-opening.

More than one-third of the $35 million in state and federal funds allocated for Gov. Pete Wilson’s post-riot employment and training initiative has gone to short-term, low-paying jobs that critics say have little long-term economic impact. Many jobs--in which unemployed adults and youths could earn no more than $6,000 in six months--were for riot cleanup, graffiti removal and park maintenance with such organizations as the California Conservation Corps.

Another $1.8 million was set aside for a “Neighbor to Neighbor” program, in which participants were hired as community organizers to develop volunteer teams to help reduce tensions during the federal trial of the officers accused of violating King’s civil rights.

Administrative overhead and case management for the short-term public service jobs account for $2.9 million of the pot.

Much of the remainder, about $20 million, has been targeted for job training and development efforts, many of which are just getting under way.

In Los Angeles, a $260,650 program is designed to offer business advice and skills to the owners of riot-ravaged liquor stores willing to convert their businesses to coin laundries, restaurants or other non-controversial uses.

Another $439,418 has been spent to expand an existing program training inner-city high school students for jobs as retail clerks and managers. This year, more than 160 students at five schools are enrolled in the after-school business classes, which help in finding part-time jobs.

Most trainees say they feel fortunate to have this opportunity.

“Everybody has to eat, so there’s definitely a future in this,” said Ernest Tescum, 53, a laid-off parking lot manager enrolled in a five-month program that trains grocery clerks.

But like several other such programs, the $246,100 supermarket training effort, which also provides remedial math and English instruction to students in need, is not all that it was billed to be.

Literature prepared by the Private Industry Council of the City of Los Angeles, which administers training funds for the city, describes the program as “customized training” with direct job commitments from 99 Only Stores and markets that are members of the Mexican-American Grocers Assn.

However, officials of the private Center for Employment Training, which runs the program for the city, acknowledged in interviews that they have no hiring arrangement with the 99 Only chain. Although the grocers helped provide equipment for the classroom--which includes a supermarket mock-up--its members are not obligated to hire students.

Privately funded training programs such as the Toyota-Urban League effort were branded as among the most important post-riot programs by then-RLA Co-Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth. Such programs offer disadvantaged inner-city residents, some of whom might otherwise be considered unemployable, a golden opportunity to enter the job market--if jobs are available.

But critics contend that such corporate largess can go only so far toward stimulating the economy.

“It would do more good for firms not to transfer jobs from Los Angeles to Tucson than to put in 10 times the money they do in training programs,” said economist Joel Kotkin, an international fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Business and Management.

Brenda Shockley, director of Community Build, a federally funded private recovery effort launched by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-L.A.), said Toyota officials appear to regard “what they were doing more as charity than as a business commitment.”

“If people could be trained by Toyota, (you’d think) there would have been some level of commitment of hiring by Toyota itself,” Shockley said.

Because inner-city residents have usually been excluded from economic opportunities, she said, “there’s a reason to reach further, and the economy can’t be allowed to just be used as an excuse.”

Toyota plans to operate the center for three years and then turn over full control to the Urban League. About 100 students a year are to receive training in basic repair skills. But Toyota’s commitment, company officials say, is limited to placing the graduates with other firms.

“From the very beginning of our discussions with Toyota it was indicated that . . . an advanced level of training was required for people they usually hire,” said Los Angeles Urban League President John Mack, speaking on behalf of his organization and Toyota. “Clearly there is room for improvement, but it appears that most of the (first) 10 (graduates) have been able to improve their lives.”

Moreover, Mack said, most of the graduates of two subsequent training center classes are still working. Like Toyota, Hyundai Motor America created an automotive training program for low-income South-Central Los Angeles residents. In Hyundai’s case, promises were made to hire graduates into full-time jobs at local Hyundai dealerships.

Company officials say that all but one of the first 25 graduates, who were paid $5-an-hour stipends during training, have received jobs at an average of $10an hour. But a new round of classes has been postponed until next year because “our dealerships could only absorb so many technicians,” said spokeswoman Dotty Diemer.

Arco also sponsored a post-riot program to train inner-city residents to qualify for jobs as smog check technicians. However, during its one year in operation, only 27 of the 60 enrollees were able to pass a state certification test.

Next: Inner-city loan programs.