A Plaintive Wail
And now, back to the letter.
According to commenter Art Brown the plaintive Redevelopment wail signed by Mayor HeeHaw on behalf of all of us was actually scribed by the League of Cities and sent out as a boilerplate template for the incompetent locals who, presumably, couldn’t be trusted to mount their own intellectual and philosophical defense of Redevelopment (think: “we neeeed the muh-nie!”)
Of course there is space at the end of the missive to insert one’s community’s dubious Redevelopment accomplishments. And Fullerton did.
Mr. Brown’s claim certainly has the ring of truth to it. It reminds me of a gang of dope addicts defending their habit.
As to the letter itself, observe the following:
The claims that Redevelopment is a job creator and some sort of economic engine is, of course, utter nonsense. It is indeed a massive boon to subsidized corporations and Redevelopment master planners, consultants and bond salesmen. Redevelopment is simply a zero-sum revenue diversion scheme whose manifest failures are immediately forgotten. The funniest part of the letter may be the way one bent branch of government uses the screw-ups of another (SB 375 and AB 32) to justify itself.
Then there is the hilarious claim that Redevelopment is really poverty-stricken, once the bond holders are paid off!
You would think a letter honestly outlining the effects of Redevelopment in Fullerton would have described just a few of the disastrous quagmires that Redevelopment and it organizers have gotten us into: boondoggles amply illustrated in these pages. But no. No Harbor/Commonwealth; no SRO; no Poisoned Park; no endless succession of useless downtown master plans; no attempt to relocate a McDonald’s 200 feet. Wait. Come to think of it they did: cited as an accomplishment is the idiotic Richman housing project!
Affordable housing. Where poor people are cleared out and replaced by less poor people. And this was never one of the rationales for Redevelopment. The housing set-aside was created to protect the poor from dislocation due to the great Urban Renewal mega projects of the 1950s and 60s.
Well, there you have it. An intellectually and morally bereft letter signed by a clown who cannot grasp anything more complicated than a fried chicken.
Are you surprised?
Don’t take away our play monies, Mistuh Brown! We neeeed them new shoppin malls.
I thought OC cities were dropping out of the League of Cities in favor of the Association of California Cities?
Of course, the AOCC could be just as useless, but why hasn’t our council at least discussed the issue?
1A/1B
Why not have these goody two-shoes Associations in the first place?
Perhaps, the councilmembers throughout Orange County don’t have the balls to tell those working at the AOCC your jobs are gone!
It is not funny to extract hardworking tax dollars to keep bureaucrats on a damn payroll like League of Cities, AOCC.
Don’t forget there are Contract Cities, City Manager Association and other useless groups that needs to dissolve and make those bureaucrats go to work instead of hobnobbing and rubbing elbows at their meetings.
Did the Council/Agency get to vote on whether to send this letter?
No Chris. Jones signed the letter and sent it out on everyone’s behalf without any public discussion.
I think that a boilerplate letter should be circulated among school boards, for board chairmen to sign, that encourages the State’s government to phase out redevelopment, in order to stop the diversion of property taxes from school districts to RDAs.
Each boilerplate letter should have a blank area to fill in, which indicates how much local property tax revenue has been diverted from that particular school district over the last ten years to the RDA or RDAs covered by that district. Then the letter should remind the Governor that the diverted monies had to be “backfilled” either from ADA or from the county-administered ERAFs.
The “sponsor” of the letter should be either the CTA or an equivalent state-wide organization that represents public employees of school districts.
Best wishes, WSH
Snow, can you email me at chris@btrepro.com?
Chris I think this a really good idea! You could create a whole movement saying “it’s for the children.”
It should be for the kids, after all they are our future, you know.
Strange bedfellows indeed.
http://www.cta.org/About-CTA/News-Room/Press-Releases/2011/01/20110114_1.aspx
Will Dems turn their backs on big government economic fascism?
Will Republicans turn their backs on big government economic fascism?
Stay tuned!
Probably
If you go to the League of Cities web page and click on the 1/28/11 news letter there is a link to http://www.protectourlocaleconomy.com/
Click on the Take Action Tab at the top of the page and you can click and download the sample letter and resolution that the cities have been mailing to Sacramento.