Published
4 years agoon
Voters and elected officials adopt policies on assurances of beneficial impacts, but they often interact with other decrees to produce what are called “unintended consequences.”
Redevelopment has been a classic example for nearly seven decades, and it may be on the verge of another twist.
Cities twisted the legal requirement for finding “blight” with some very creative, even sneaky maneuvers. One declared some marshland to be blighted because it was “subject to periodic flooding.” And they would use generous grants of redevelopment money – bribes, actually – to lure tax-generating commercial business away from neighboring cities.
A decade after Proposition 13 passed, voters acted again, passing Proposition 98 that guaranteed certain levels of financing for public schools and required the state to provide whatever money schools needed if local property taxes didn’t meet required levels.
By and by, as redevelopment use expanded, diversions of property taxes reached about $5.5 billion a year and because of Proposition 98, the state was backfilling about $2 billion to schools.
Thus, three sweeping policy decrees over several decades interacted to produce the consequence of taxpayers throughout the state indirectly spending billions of dollars each year to subsidize commercial projects for a few cities.
The excesses of redevelopment – such as $5 million to underwrite a “mermaid bar” just two blocks from the state Capitol in Sacramento – and its heavy financial impact on an upside-down state budget led then-Gov. Jerry Brown and legislators to do away with it in 2011.
Ever since, city officials have yearned for redevelopment’s return, saying that its demise also reduced financing for badly needed low- and moderate-income housing.
Several highly modified versions have been enacted, but have largely gone unused because all protected the state budget.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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