City Councilman Andy Weissman did not want to inflate the significance of a 15-minute meeting on Sunday when he and Mayor Mehaul O’Leary huddled with Assemblymember Holly Mitchell (D-Culver City) about reviving the mordant Redevelopment Agency.
“She is just one legislator,” Mr. Weissman said.
“It takes more than one person — it takes the Assembly. It takes the Senate, and it takes the governor to be able to move the process along.”
The Councilman sought to explain to Ms. Mitchell “the significance of redevelopment in Culver City, and to take a leadership role in saving redevelopment. She is on an Assembly committee charged with determining if anything can be done” about rescuing 400 Redevelopment Agencies scheduled to go out of business two weeks from today.
Carrying a Hope
“We are hoping,” Mr. Weissman said, “that she will advocate on behalf of Culver City on that committee. She understood what we needed and the importance of redevelopment to the community.”
The Mayor and Mr. Weissman seemed to be upbeat when they broke up. “I got the impression she was supportive,” the Council leader said. Mr. Weissman, however, is a realist. “What comes out of that process,” he said, “remains to be seen.”
Turns out he was not upbeat at the end of the hometown summit conference. “I did not feel any more confident at the end than I did going in,” he said. “That had nothing to do with Holly,” he quickly added. “It had to do with the prevailing (legislative) sentiment that seems to be total antipathy against redevelopment, with the exception of housing.”
‘Bad’ Redevelopment
Mr. Weissman said he does not know why. “But one reason could be that there have been some examples of bad redevelopment. I am referring to projects done poorly by developers selected for reasons perhaps less than community-necessary and more politically required.
“Unfortunately, as has been said by a number of people, ‘because there were a couple of bad apples in the bunch, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.’
“Instead of taking a scalpel or a laser and cutting away the bad pieces of redevelopment, they used a hatchet to eliminate redevelopment entirely.
“Very unfortunate, in my opinion,” Mr. Weissman said.
In Voting Redevelopment Agencies out of business last year, the Councilman suspects there were unrelated factors.
“A lot more was at stake than redevelopment,” Mr. Weissman said. “It was an effort to secure additional funding in Sacramento, and the focus on ‘bad’ redevelopment provided the justification for the elimination of redevelopment.
“I don’t know how many people believed redevelopment was as bad as claimed.
“Amongst the 400 Redevelopment Agencies in California, if you go community by community, I would venture to say that many if not most communities think their redevelopment was good redevelopment.
“Much like the arguments regarding term limits, I would think if a community thought redevelopment were going badly, they would make a change in how redevelopment was practiced.”
Diverging slightly, Mr. Weissman said that Gov. Brown, verdently or inadvertently, got everything he wanted after saying at the first of last year he wanted to eliminate Redevelopment Agencies.”
Since his needs have been satisfied, “what reason is there for him to carve out exceptions for us?
“The outrage you feel on the local level for losing redevelopment is not felt in Sacramento where change needs to come.”
