School’d
So on the subject of redevelopment, there’s so many things to say, so many important discussions to have. As commenter Just Plain Dave reminded me, I have over the years promised to flesh out a few of my thoughts, and have done so in many areas. But the enormity of the issues and the amount of time it takes to dig up the info I’d like to use to talk about them some times overwhelms me and I procrastinate.
There’s a brief discussion on Michele Ellson’s Island of Alameda blog which is great reading. I chimed in and had my ass handed to me by Tony Daysog (he was respectful, I’m not trying to suggest otherwise, I appreciated that, but I had my math all wrong and need to thank him for the correction). Just to attempt to slightly redeem myself, the numbers Tony mentions should be reduced by about 500K to account for the Pass-Through money the city does receive from the redevelopment areas making the actual redirection from the city’s general fund about $2.6 million. (The money is used to support bond issues for projects in Alameda).
Tony also wrote a wonderful explanation of why criticisms of redevelopment in Alameda are often so off-base (criticize it! there are things to criticize, but the heavy reliance on examples of bad redev in other city’s ring completely hollow unless you can show that the same problems exist in Alameda.) For this I was hugely grateful, it saves me writing the same thing.
Here’s his summation:
Is redevelopment mis-used in California? Yeah, there’s no doubt it is. But just because some city in California is mis-using redevelopment, should we, in Alameda, throw out this baby with the bath water, so to speak? I don’t think so.
Does redevelopment come with fiscal trade-offs, in terms of diverting property taxes from the General Fund or other taxing entities to the RDA, such that money that would otherwise pay for services is now locked in (for the most part) for infrastructure purposes? Sure, that happens… But the way to get around that is being creative about policies such as MSD or what land use choices you decide to pursue.
I’d suggest that Tony’s full post is a must read.
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