First of two parts
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Mr. O'Leary
Ten months after being elected to a second four-year term, City Councilman Mehaul O’Leary this afternoon made an arresting statement that would have astounded the community seven years ago:
“I am concerned that not a single redevelopment project will be completed while I am in office.”
Former Council members Alan Corlin, Gary Silbiger and Steve Rose, who were on the dais in the first half of the first decade of the century, would fall away in shock.
During their eight years in office, they seemed to devote 80 percent of their weekly meetings to refereeing bouts between quarreling builders and residents. Proposed buildings were too tall, too near, too loud, too wrong in content in those fiscal halcyon days.
Rare was the Monday night that a promised/threatened redevelopment was not heatedly debated.
First the recession almost singlehandedly halted redevelopment across Culver City. Whatever body parts remained of the corpse, was splattered in the bloodied street a little more than a year ago when Gov. Brown instigated municipal mayhem when he ordered the state’s Redevelopment Agencies killed off so he could collect entire pies of revenue.
With two spectacular Downtown schemes pending – Parcel B, across from the Culver Hotel, and Washington/National, on the large, yawning Expo light rail property –Mr. O’Leary is not optimistic that either will be (much?) past the drawing board before he leaves City Hall.
If Sacramento is listening, Mr. O’Leary has three years to serve, and then he is termed out.
As an Irishman with a perpetually sunny outlook, he remains hopeful if not confident he will see them built.
For more than a year, City Hall impatiently has waited for the instantly empowered, previously arcane, state Dept. of Finance to approve the financial arrangements the City Council hurriedly negotiated on both projects ahead of Gov. Brown’s arbitrarily imposed deadline last year.
Derisively, Mr. O’Leary calls the agency the “Dept. of Fiscal Foolishness.”
The once 90-pound-weakling Dept. of Finance is playing the suddenly ordained neighborhood bully, Mr. O’Leary and other Council members have complained.
“The state could be collecting millions in revenue, $18 million a year, if they would just let us go ahead with Parcel B,” says Mr. O’Leary.
Tomorrow: Mr. O’Leary explains why.
