Pledges to rebuild L.A. top $100 million: more than 5,000 offers of time, money and equipment.

People and organizations to date have made more than 5,000 offers of money, time, equipment, etc., worth at least $100 million to the Rebuild L.A. program following the recent Los Angeles riots' devastation.

That was the estimate last week by Brian M. Kadison, L.A. director of Business Systems Consulting at Arthur Andersen & Co., a Big Six accounting firm, who was named Rebuild L.A.'s technology coordinator shortly after the riots. As such, he quickly created and is managing a computer database to record and catalogue all offers of assistance that have been pledged to Rebuild L.A., a non-profit organization established to facilitate the city's redevelopment process.

Analysis of the more than 5,000 pledges received and recorded in the database, Kadison said, indicates their value aggregates a "nine-digit number." (He declined to be more specific because of the difficulty of assessing monetary value to volunteers' time and pledged contributions of equipment and materials.)

In attempting to break down the estimated total value into subcategories, Kadison said:

* One-fifth represented pledged cash.

* One-third represented volunteered time. (Arthur Andersen, for example, already has logged more than 2,000 man-hours of pro bono work, with a value exceeding $200,000, he said, primarily work on the database.)

* The remainder represented offers of equipment and other products, offers to build, vacant office space for Rebuild L.A. personnel to occupy, etc.

Rebuild L.A., for example, just moved into proffered office space that will hold 70 workers in the former Kaiser Permanente clinic at Eighth Place and Francisco, Kadison said. Many of the workers temporarily had used proffered space in Arthur Andersen's downtown L.A. offices while inputting pledges into the computer database, he added.

Some 30 IBM and compatible personal computers used for the database project were donated by IBM and AST Research Corp., Kadison noted, while Epson America contributed computer printers. He created the database by using the Paradox software program donated by Borland International Inc.

Other software companies also contributed copies of their programs, Kadison related: DOS, Windows, Excel and Word by Microsoft Corp.; WordPerfect 5.1 by WordPerfect Corp.; Norton Utilities and Norton Antivirus by Symantec Corp. The anti-virus program, in fact, detected and cured a computer virus the first week of database activity, he said, scratching his head over how the virus got introduced.

Software publishers Lotus Development Corp. and Quarterdeck Office Systems also contributed copies of their programs, he added, and Novell Inc. contributed assistance for computer networking, which was implemented last week. Xerox Corp. contributed copying and fax machines for Rebuild L.A. to use, Kadison said, while Pacific Telesis Group contributed telephones and Northern Telecom contributed "phonework."

With the database inputting largely completed, Kadison said, his volunteers now are using the donated Word and WordPerfect word processing software to create letters that will be mailed to people who pledged support. The donated Paradox program also is being used to generate the mailing labels, he said.

The letters are being followed up by direct contact, Kadison said. "We're combing the offers now and making contacts as appropriate."

Asked what will happen to donated equipment, etc., upon the conclusion of the Rebuild L.A. program, Kadison replied: Although the database work likely will be wrapped up within two months, the total Rebuild L.A. program's "sunset is way out in the future."