This figures to be Day Two – among five – in City Hall’s perspirational wait for an arcane agency in Sacramento to validate a hometown committee’s approval last Thursday of the city’s sale of the Downtown property known as Parcel B to a development team.
Owing to a recently state-designed, still untested labyrinthine network that forces cities to spend time hoop-jumping, Culver City is in a holding pattern.
The little-known and less admired state Dept. of Finance has five business days from last Thursday’s vote to embrace or reject what City Hall proposes to do.
The six vote-eligible members of the Oversight Board unanimously approved a City Council decision to sell the pricey plot of land in front of The Culver Hotel to a private collaboration, Combined/Hudson Properties.
Mayor Andy Weissman, a member of the Oversight Board, noted that the Parcel B proposition – which has been hanging around for years, in its present incarnation since last Jan. 31 – whirled through the Board without resistance last week.
Presumably by Thursday at the latest, the state Dept. of Finance will rule up or down on the city proposal, the only arrangement that makes fiscal sense, according to City Hall.
Is Mr. Weissman optimistic about a favorable verdict? “More hopeful than optimistic,” he said.
This is a test tube baby.
“Up to now,” said Mr. Weissman, “the Dept. of Finance has not ruled on anything similar to the project we are putting forth.”
If the state says no to the deal, a separate deal necessarily would be significantly scaled down financially, sources said, and all parties including the state would net less revenue.
Because the state Legislature, at the behest of Gov. Brown, last year killed the Redevelopment Agency system throughout California, city-based transactions such as Parcel B now must travel through a purposely complex system as a sign of the state’s newly won authority over 400 municipalities.
At bottom, Gov. Brown killed the system because he wanted to collect redevelopment monies previously reserved for cities.
