After months of blatherskating, posturing, exaggerating and lying by California’s best known politicians, it took two chaps none of the liars ever has heard of to strip the Redevelopment Agency controversy down to its presumed naked truth.
Last night at the Culver City Democratic Club meeting, with force and with windshield wiper-clarity, young Johnny Kernick from the office of Assemblyperson Holly J. Mitchell (D-Culver City) and the more paternal Downtown businessman Ken Kaufman knifed through four months of non-stop bureaucratic misdirection as if they were piloting a speedboat across The Plunge.
Mr. Kernick brilliantly dissected and defended his boss’s perceived Hobson’s Choice predicament last summer when she vigorously voted to destroy the historic and popular statewide Redevelopment Agency latticework that had been in operation since long before she was born.
In spite of a rainbow of glowing, voluble, on-the-record promises last winter that the Redevelopment Agency would be re-born this season with a similar, practically indistinguishable, mission, Mr. Kernick told the Dem Club audience several times, “It is not coming back, in any form.”
Mr. Kaufman, unsurprisingly, sketched a dreary portrait of the new reality for Culver City’s Downtown. Entrepreneurs who had been building the formerly dead commercial area to a national eye-catching crescendo at a bristling pace in a partnership with City Hall, find the stream of aid suddenly dried up. Their fiscal throats are parched.
If they took their first-time show on the road, the team of Kernick and Kaufman – or Kaufman and Kernick – could, double-handedly, restore Redevelopment Agency-style peace to the entire state by mid-summer.
Matching and Mixing
One is a rising star, who appears to be fresh off his bar mitzvah, and the other already is a luminary, a former television and film producer, owner of two popular hot spots, City Tavern and Rush Street, and an influential voice in the Downtown Business Assn.
Mr. Kernick’s assignment:
To explain, arguably, why it was necessary for the almost monopolistic Democratic legislators in Sacramento, nudged daily by a Democratic governor, to wipe out 66 years of Redevelopment Agency achievements and channel all monies to the state while 400 cities were told “Adjust. Learn austerity.”
Mr. Kaufman’s role:
To accessibly demonstrate how the loss of Culver City’s Redevelopment Agency 3½ months ago negatively – and permanently – has worked against the formerly soaring Downtown environment.
At a point, one Dem Club member drew Mr. Kernick squarely into his sights:
“Given all the losses we have suffered from losing the Redevelopment Agency, what was (Ms. Mitchell) thinking when she voted to end the agencies?
“My second question is, why should I vote for her this year after she fails to represent us?”
He Came Prepared
Mr. Kernick did not blink while addressing the historic tensions between opposing forces of Redevelopment’s charge, affordable housing vs. upgrading commercial areas.
“One of the things Holly Mitchell had to contemplate, she had to pick, to choose between a lot of very well deserving items in the budget that affect children, families, elderly. Redevelopment was one of them.
“It was a matter of taking a scalpel and finding the line items that need to be removed and continue to be streamlined.
“Redevelopment’s original purpose was to fix blighted neighborhoods.
“While the Downtown area is absolutely beautiful, a wonderful promenade – my wife and I often attend movies, restaurants, bars, everything that is offered Downtown – Redevelopment originally was for fixing blighted neighborhoods and financing low-income housing.
“It really was not being used for that (when Gov. Brown championed its destruction).
“That is a fact.”
To buttress his assertion, Mr. Kernick reached for a March statement by (former) Mayor Mehaul O’Leary at the groundbreaking for the Tilden Terrace housing project.
“The Mayor was quoted as saying ‘this is the first affordable housing in 50 years,’” Mr. Kernick said.
“Well, that is not what Redevelopment was for.
“When you have to choose between eliminating more money out of schools – a fairly reasonable purpose for Redevelopment money ($1.2 million annually to the School District) – it still is not fitting the Assembly’s intention for Redevelopment in the first place.”
