Gallegly Tries to Block Funds for Bottle Village

SIMI VALLEY —  Furious that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is about to give an elderly woman’s junk-art monument a $434,000 face-lift at taxpayer expense, U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly introduced a bill Tuesday to block funding for repairs to earthquake-damaged Bottle Village.

But Bottle Village supporters prepared to fight back, eager to rebuild the fantasy hamlet hewn by the late Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey out of beer bottles, TVs, doll heads and cement.

Gallegly argued that nearly half a million dollars in federal tax money could be better spent.

“I don’t consider rebuilding Bottle Village something that is going to protect the health and welfare of the people in the throes of an emergency,” Gallegly said Tuesday.

“We have an emergency in Northern California today, where people are dying and they’ve lost thousands of homes and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of farmland” in Central Valley flooding, Gallegly said. “And we are saying we’re wealthy enough that we can spend half a million dollars to fix something that the people in the community say they don’t want fixed.”

Simi Valley Councilwoman Sandi Webb dashed off an angry letter Tuesday to Gov. Pete Wilson, protesting “a monstrous waste of public funds” on “a collection of trash.”

“They’re giving enough money to Bottle Village to repair it to a better condition than it was in before the earthquake,” Webb said in an interview.

“People’s homes are still damaged from the earthquake . . . and we’ve got the police station and roads that really need [the money],” she said. “There’s a few people that think it is great, and if they want to put the time and money into it, they’re welcome to do so. But I’ve got a real problem when they put my money into it.”

Daniel Paul, a 24-year-old art student and bartender charged with overseeing the FEMA-funded reconstruction of Bottle Village, says the money will be well spent.

He admits that $210,000 of the FEMA grant will provide two years’ pay for administrators and work crews to rebuild what Prisbrey wrought in the three decades before she died in 1988 at 92.

“But tens of thousands of [the remaining money] would be spent in the community,” Paul said. “We have to buy equipment, we have to buy supplies, we have to eat, we have to rent storage space. It’s been our intention all along to go local as much as possible.”

And once Bottle Village is repaired, it can bring tourist dollars to Simi Valley as it did years ago, when it was the second most popular tourist attraction in town after the Corriganville movie ranch, Paul said.

Paul said he spent Tuesday phoning supporters and historical consultants, looking for ways to hang on to the money that will preserve Prisbrey’s bizarre little acre.

In the end, the battle over Bottle Village may be as much about art as it is about money.

While FEMA has lumped Bottle Village in the same category as the Watts Towers of South-Central Los Angeles--which are already getting more than $900,000 in earthquake aid--many Simi Valley residents call it a junk pile.

Letters to local newspapers suggest spending the money to bulldoze the place, and Webb has begged Wilson to “halt this insanity . . . before it’s too late.”

This type of art-versus-garbage argument has long swirled around nontraditional artworks, from the junkyard phantasms of Los Angeles sculptor Edward Kienholz to the silk-screened soup cans of Andy Warhol.

But Bottle Village’s artistic pedigree bears a few twists:

The 4595 Cochran Road site is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is California Historical Landmark No. 939 and Ventura County Historical Landmark No. 52.

And by all accounts, it was already pretty much of a wreck before the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged all but one of Prisbrey’s 33 handcrafted houses and shook several to rubble.

That’s another bone of contention: Paul’s grant proposal insists that the earthquake did 95% of the damage. But Gallegly says that claim is, “in my opinion, a fraud.”

Paul countered, “The prior damage is diminished by the earthquake damage. There was so much of it.

“I’m not going to say we shouldn’t be spending money on the police station or worrying about farmers being flooded out. But it’s also legitimate to be spending money on Bottle Village, because it’s a highly significant site that could be bringing money--tourist dollars--into Simi Valley.”