Second in a series.
Re: “Of Aging Parcel B and Pyramids”
Late in the last century, elected officials were talking about the plum Downtown plot known as Parcel B as if their vision of an offices/retail complex would bloom in the coming months.
Two hundred months have wafted away in the interim, the Redevelopment Agency, the city’s chief mechanism, was vanquished by Gov. Brown in 2011, and the surface of the land in front of The Culver Hotel has changed only to a hiccup of a degree.
What is the holdup? Vice Mayor Andy Weissman was asked.
“The essential holdups were primarily that when the Redevelopment Agency selected Combined Development and entered into development agreements with them, and then the Redevelopment Agency went away, the Successor Agency had to secure state approval to implement the agreement.
“There was a time,” said Mr. Weissman, “when there was the expectation the state was going to come in and tell all Redevelopment Agencies that all properties they owned must be put on the market and sold to the highest bidder.
“We had to go through the process of establishing the legal basis for us to be able to go ahead and sell the property to Combined.”
Months morphed into years.
The creaking, clanking machinery of government-approval agencies moved at the pace of a lightning victim.
“We finally obtained permission from the state Dept. of Finance,” said Mr. Weissman, “as part of the 2,000-plus-page Long Range Asset Management Plan. Once that approval was granted, the next battle was a discussion with the Dept. of Finance over the future of the city-owned parking structures. We weren’t sure if the DOF was going to tell us we had to be put the structures on the market and sold. Because the Ince Parking structure is tied to the Parcel B development through entitlements, we couldn’t move forward on Parcel B until the parking issues were resolved.”
The longer the vice mayor explored off-stage reasons for the years’ long delay, the clearer it became the builder and the city are well short of ready to send out Save the Date groundbreaking invitations.
(To be continued)
