Helmi Hisserich’s place in the remaking of Hollywood took shape in the administration of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, where she was a member of the Business Development Team.

Recruited from the East Los Angeles Business Assistance Center, which she helped organize, Hisserich had asked to be assigned to Hollywood just as the city was about to have nearly $1 billion in investment poured into the neighborhood for Hollywood & Highland and the Cinerama Dome Entertainment Center.

“Helmi is the epitome of what I was trying to accomplish with the reorganization and the decentralization of the agency,” said Bud Ovrom, chief executive of the Community Redevelopment Agency, who brought her on in 2003. “Hollywood is booming and she is really the right person in the right place to do that work.”

She calls her current position with the CRA a dream job. “It couldn’t have been a better fit for me, personally and professionally,” she said.

Hisserich sees her role at the CRA as a “technician” structuring and negotiating deals.

She is in talks with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to work on a business attraction project (the CRA was influential in bringing Nielsen Media Research to Hollywood). She is also leading the agency’s efforts to find developers to convert existing multi-family units into limited equity co-ops or condominiums, transformations that have not been done in Hollywood.

Hisserich has kept her office’s focus on three core industries: tourism, entertainment and education, which she said is “a huge industry base in Hollywood.”

She is working with the Hollywood-based Musicians Institute, which has 1,000 students and wants to improve its fa & #231;ade and double its campus size. Hisserich also is pushing to provide Wi-Fi access along Hollywood Boulevard.

On the tourism side, she has played a role in the negotiations of the future Hollywood & Vine development, a mixed-use project that will include a W Hotel. “We wouldn’t do (the Hollywood & Vine deal) just for housing, even though housing is important,” she said. “The hotel is a key part of it and their commitment to employment is really important.”

Hisserich wants to take her tourism focus further. “Hollywood as a community has been trying to figure out how to market itself better,” she said. “We are looking at ways we can invest in improvements in the way Hollywood attracts people into the economy. As an economic driver, the more visitors we have has a multiplier effect on the local economy because those are all new dollars circulating.”

It’s a different role than the one she played in the Riordan administration, where she provided more policy guidance, political support and represented the city to the community on projects like the Cinerama Dome and Hollywood & Highland.

A native of Hollywood, she started her professional life running a bookstore with her mother. The business failed, and she spent six years in investment banking before enrolling in Cornell University’s MBA program in 1992.

“While I was at Cornell, I couldn’t stop thinking about Los Angeles. I was constantly looking into how you could use business to do good things for the city,” said Hisserich. “I wanted to make changes.”