Second of two parts
Re “Will the Redevelopment Agency Survive?”
The guessing game inside City Hall in this first serious week of summer is whether — or how much of — the Redevelopment Agency will survive the new, arcane regulations trickling down the state from the Legislature.
City Councilman Andy Weissman, around City Hall longer than any of his colleagues, is perplexed. In the absence of legal analysis, Mr. Weissman spoke of unofficial reports that Culver City’s “extortion fee” to the state “for the first year will be $11 million, and is likely to be $3 million every year thereafter. I don’t know how such numbers were arrived at, and I am not even sure about their reliability.”
The 400 mostly small towns who stand to lose their redevelopment agencies if Gov. Brown has his way, have been vehemently protesting since the latest state budget was floated and completed last week. Consistently for the half-year he has been in office, numerous municipalities have questioned the legality of Mr. Brown’s intended elimination of their prized redevelopment agencies. They threaten to tie up his proposal in the courts, for years if necessary. Whether such town leaders possess the political will to follow through still is undetermined.
Mr. Weissman said that even if cities take the governor and Legislature to court, it is unclear whether agencies could continue to conduct regular business during the interim or tap their feet, awaiting an answer.
Meanwhile, since this is only the fifth day after Gov. Brown signed the much-criticized budget that relies heavily on faith and hope, “everybody still is trying to assess the impacts. I don’t know, for instance, where the $11 million would come from because we have transferred the Redevelopment Agency’s money to the city in consideration for the city to take on the Agency’s obligations.
“The end result may be that over the next 20 to 25 years, we will be able to finish those projects we identified last November-December-January, utilize tax increments for those purposes. Anything that is not for those purposes goes to the state if we don’t pay them the $11 million.”
