Part five
Re “How Culver City Is Fighting the Governor’s Death Sentence”
According to this morning’s Los Angeles Titanic, Gov. Bald Retread is climbing aboard his donkey — which is either redundant or oxymoronic — to tour the state with his favorite tin cup extended.
“Taxes or Bust,” screams the streamer pasted onto the donkey’s tummy.
For an undetermined amount of time — hopefully five or six years — Gov. Retread will honor the peasants of California by clippity-clopping through aging, naïve hamlets from north to south, hoping to convince the most gullible wretches to stir a Wisconsin-style ruckus so that the stalled legislature legally will be able to cram at least five years of new taxes down our choking throats.
Part of their reward for being so darned compliant will be the abolition of California’s 398 redevelopment agencies that have spruced up 398 communities, one of numerous obvious facts Gov. Retread routinely denies.
In this final installment, we come to Andy Weissman. We posed the central questoon for the most experienced member of Culver City’s Redevelopment Agency:
What are the primary purposes of a redevelopment agency?
“To remove blight, to provide for economic development and to fulfill our affordable housing responsibilities,” Mr. Weissman said.
The question arose last weekend after the Titanic declared in its lead Sunday editorial that constructing cheap (okay, they said “affordable”) housing is the only justification for the existence of redevelopment agencies.
For at least the seventh or eighth time since Gov. Retread pronounced agencies irredeemably corrupt, the Titanic, neatly plumped in the lap of Bald the ventriloquist, repeated the corruption accusation. They were darned convincing except for the absence of evidence. What inflames our emotional liberal pals is the unsupported assertion that too darned many developers have become “rich” building redevelopment projects. All God’s children know that gooey “rich” is the filthiest four-letter word in any decent wretch’s lexicon.
Mr. Weissman was asked where “affordable housing” is on the priority list?
It is a main responsibility, he said, “to the extent that state legislation establishing redevelopment required that 20 percent of tax increment be set aside for affordable housing.”
Doesn’t that leave 80 percent, an overwhelming preponderance, for other pursuits?
“Yes, except when the state wants more revenue and they can take it, the 80-20 establishes a fund that is limited in purpose to fulfilling affordable housing responsibilities.
“You can argue whether that means creating brand new affordable housing or assisting in the provision of affordable housing elsewhere, which is where a lot of our money goes.
“Nowhere in the legislation that I am aware of it, other than housing, is there direction for how the money is to be used.”
And then Mr. Weissman had a little fun with the patented vagueness of instructions from the state government down to hometown city halls.
“I know there are some broad parameters — that you can’t use redevelopment dollars to pay the electric bill, except in certain circumstances where you can.
“But it does say, in essence, you are to leave your housing dollars for housing purposes.”
Redevelopment agencies differ widely throughout the largest and most varied state in the union.
As a strong advocate for retaining redevelopment agencies, Mr. Weissman acknowledged that the missions of agencies will vary greatly because of geographic and demographic realities.
“You can’t compare the nature of high-profile redevelopment in Los Angeles with hundreds of small communities,” he said. “You can’t compare the Staples Center and its environs with anything that goes on in most communities.
“I don’t know if you can conclude that if the developer is profiting from the Staples Center and its offshoots that there isn’t a corresponding benefit in other smaller communities. There may be dollars coming out of that development that L.A. uses to promote affordable housing.”
Isn’t this where it all started.
