Re “Monday Night’s Grim Tale Will Not Be a Fairy Tale”
Discouragingly, City Hall’s coffers that have underwritten nine different housing programs are nearly empty, and help is not an option.
“The only way local government is going to have fresh funding for housing programs,” said City Councilman Andy Weissman, “is for the state to legislatively create a financing vehicle that would allow funds to come to the cities.”
This is the elephant that the Council will be wrestling with in this evening’s 7 o’clock meeting in Council Chambers – where, how to find a creative stream of revenue for the city’s suffering low-income housing program.
With the elimination of redevelopment agencies by Gov. Brown and loss of that tax increment, said Mr. Weissman, “the only revenue sources cities have to fund housing programs would come from the general fund.
“It is the analysis that frequently takes place – that there is only a finite amount of general fund revenue to pay for services, police, fire and others.
“If we are going to utilize general fund monies as the revenue source for housing,” Mr. Weissman said, “it is going to come at the expense of other things. I don’t know what they are. We haven’t gotten to that point.
“If a majority of the Council believes housing programs are required and we instruct staff to move forward, they will come back with a fiscal analysis. It will show if we are going to use ‘x’ dollars for housing, it means we will have to reduce or eliminate other services or programs.”
See www.culvercity.org/agendas
