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If Redevelopment Agency Is Killed, Will Community Events and Jobs Die, Too

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1. Summer Music Festival series.

2. Taste of the Nation.

3. Farmers Market.

4. Made in Culver City.

5. Music in the Chambers

6. Speak Easy.

7. Car Show.

8. Indiecade.

Amidst gathering signs that California’s community redevelopment agencies will be signed out of existence this week by Gov. Brown, what will happen in Culver City to the above events sponsored by the Redevelopment Agency?

No definitive answers are available yet from City Hall.

“All of them would have to be paid for out of the General Fund, and since we don’t have money to fix our streets, I just don’t know,” City Councilman Andy Weissman said this morning.

“I am expecting the worst,” said Vice Mayor Mehaul O’Leary, Chair of the Redevelopment Agency.

In the spirit of teamwork or shared sacrifice, he speculated that some of free events are so popular residents might be willing to hand over $5 to be admitted.

Of more personalized interest, two dozen jobs in the Community Redevelopment Dept. are at stake. They would be wiped out, theoretically, by one swipe of the governor’s pen in a few days.

“I don’t know how we can just let that many people go,” Mr. O’Leary said. “Will there be transfers?”

City governments are not expected to shun resistance and slink passively into the night like gentle lambs.

When city halls push back, will agencies win a reprieve?

“We still don’t know what effect our legal wranglings are going to have on this,” Mr. O’Leary said this afternoon. “We are trying the best we can to maintain the commitments we have made and to secure other commitments that already are in the process.

“There’s a lot of legal jargon here, and you never know how it will play out in a courtroom.

“We don’t know if there will be concessions (by Sacramento). There could be a compromise where we get rid of redevelopment agencies today and bring them back in a new form.”