Riordan Selects 3 Valley Residents, Katz’s Wife : City Hall: His appointments to Harbor and Recreation and Parks commissions demonstrate plan to give area a more potent role.

Mayor Richard Riordan on Friday named three San Fernando Valley residents, including Carol Rowen of Tarzana, a veteran abortion rights activist, to two City Hall commissions.

He also revealed he would appoint state Assemblyman Richard Katz’s wife to a third commission.

The official appointments to the five-member Harbor and Recreation and Parks commissions were a further demonstration of Riordan’s plan to give the Valley a more potent role in running City Hall.

Earlier this month, Riordan named 10 Valley residents to a half dozen commissions that had had only three Valley members in the Tom Bradley Administration.

Rowen, a Republican who only narrowly failed in her 1992 bid to unseat state Sen. David Roberti (D-Van Nuys) in a special election, was named to the Harbor Commission, the powerful governing body of the city’s highly lucrative port.

Rowen distinguished herself in that bitterly fought campaign by attacking Roberti, a Catholic, as an abortion foe. Rowen, whose Senate candidacy was strongly endorsed by women’s groups, was a founder of Republicans for Choice.

A businesswoman who has marketed insurance policies and worked with a company that administers pension funds, Rowen’s husband is state Superior Court judge Marvin Rowen.

Picked by Riordan Friday to sit on the Recreation and Parks Commission were LeRoy Chase, the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley, and Sofe Garcia-Conde Zuckerman, a Woodland Hills resident who is the founder and president of East Side-based Encanto Furniture Co., Inc.

Last spring, Chase ran for the Los Angeles City Council seat in the central Valley after the incumbent, Ernani Bernardi, announced his retirement. Chase finished third.

Finally, Riordan disclosed Friday, during the taping of a KCET interview program, that he intended soon to officially announce his appointment of Katz’s wife, Gini Barrett, to a seat on the Animal Regulation Commission.

Barrett is vice president for public affairs at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and recently lobbied at City Hall against enactment of new business taxes. The taxes were imposed anyway. Katz is a Sylmar-based Democrat who ran fourth in the mayor’s race last spring.

Barrett is the third politician’s wife who has been appointed to a post in the Riordan administration. Thursday, it was disclosed that Riordan had named Janis Berman, wife of U.S. Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) to be a public affairs specialist in his office.

On Friday, the mayor also appointed Lee Anderson, wife of former Congressman Glenn M. Anderson, to the Harbor Commission. Rowen and Anderson will serve with Frank Sanchez, Riordan’s campaign treasurer and the owner of several McDonald’s restaurants; and real estate executive Steven L. Soboroff; and Gertrude Schwab, who has been so active in Wilmington homeowner matters that she earned the nickname “Mrs. Wilmington.”

While the Harbor group includes one Latino, Sanchez, it breaks with recent tradition by not including any Asian-American members. Riordan’s selections mean that the port--whose top three trading partners are Japan, Korea and Taiwan--will not have an Asian-American commissioner for the first time in a quarter century.

But one port official and a representative of a giant Tawain-based shipping company agreed that the ethnic makeup of the board will be secondary in importance to the group’s business skills.

“A lot will depend on their demeanor, their international savvy,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

Riordan’s Recreation and Parks Commission nominees will also bring a strong business background to their positions. Steven J. Silberman is an executive with Allied/Royal Parking, a firm that owns more than 100 parking lots in Southern California; Herman Leavitt, an executive with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union; and Dean Pregerson, a holdover from former Mayor Bradley’s parks commission. Pregerson is an attorney, activist in many civic affairs and backer of a 1992 county ballot measure to improve parks, which was approved.

Riordan also named a prospective seventh member to the Community Redevelopment Agency board--a nomination left open last week when an earlier selection was found to live outside the city.

The new candidate, Cynthia McClain-Hill, is an investment banker and lawyer who also publishes a political newsletter targeted at young black professionals.

As with his last set of selections, Friday’s appointees were evenly divided between men and women.