Vice-Mayor Suja Lowenthal, center, publicly pleads with lawmakers in Sacramento to save redevelopment during a Thursday press conference staged outside of a run-down, vacant Willow Street liquor store that will soon be torn down and the site redeveloped. She was joined by Councilmen Robert Garcia, left, and Dee Andrews, as well as Councilwoman Rae Gabelich, behind Lowenthal.
11:01am | Long Beach elected officials publicly implored state lawmakers to spare redevelopment in the state of California during a gathering at the site of a former crime-ridden liquor store Thursday.
“Our community has spent years fighting blight and revitalizing neighborhoods, and that entire progress has been offered up as a sacrifice to put a one-time dent in the state’s deficit,” said Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal.
“That vote has the potential to either continue an incredibly effective program designed to assist our most challenged and distressed neighborhoods, or in one fell swoop end 50 years of success and doom our neighborhoods to perpetual and permanent blight.”
Redevelopment is on the chopping block as legislators consider a controversial budget package that calls for the community revitalization tool’s demise. Under the plan, the state would dismantle its redevelopment program, in which portions of property taxes are diverted back to cities to fund efforts to eliminate blight, spark economic development and create affordable housing.
Sixth District Councilman Dee Andrews knows what a vital tool it can be.
It is in Andrews’ district that Sim’s Liquor Store, a former crime hot-spot, is located. The councilman, standing under the now-vacant storefront’s street signage, rattled off a tally list of crimes ranging from murder to drug sales that had been committed on the property.
Police said they responded to 186 calls for service at the location prior to the store’s closing down.
The Long Beach Redevelopment Agency has worked for the last five years to purchase the parcel located in the Central Redevelopment Project Area that includes the liquor store property, eventually securing 530 – 558 E. Willow St. for $2.7 million and paying another $356,000 to cover the liquor store’s lease and shut it down. The dilapidated store structure will this spring be demolished and the site is planned to be incorporated into a future commercial development that complements uses related to Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, which is just about a block away, officials said.
Since the store was shuttered, the crime has stopped.
“Redevelopment has proven to help fight crime in my community,” Andrews said. “It has demonstrated to be one of the best tools at the city’s disposal to reduce crime.”
Councilwoman Rae Gabelich noted that the governor’s plan only counteracts efforts similar to those that eventually resulted in the store’s demise.
“The governor’s proposal requires that all redevelopment land and assets be sold as quickly as possible to the highest bidder, without any regard to the best use of the land, sound public policy or the desires of the community,” Gabelich said. “It is entirely conceivable that this very liquor store could open right back up again perpetuating the very blight we have worked so hard to eliminate.”
Because the RDA Board and the City Council last week both agreed to transfer ownership of all of the agency’s assets to the city to protect them from being auctioned off, however, such a scenario is almost certainly implausible.
Thursday’s event came one day after Gov. Jerry Brown’s press secretary, Gil Duran, issued a statement from the Governor’s Office just after 5 p.m. Wednesday.
“Governor Brown has continued to engage in positive and productive budget discussions with legislators on both sides of the aisle,” Duran said. “For this reason, he has asked the pro tem and the speaker to temporarily delay any vote on the budget in order to allow more time to find common ground and to put the state’s finances back in balance.”
The governor reportedly wants more time to sway Republicans who are unhappy about a proposal to extend tax increases for five years in order to preserve public education funding.
It had been speculated that state lawmakers would vote on the controversial fiscal plan this week, with the state Senate having been scheduled to vote on the package sometime yesterday.
The budget package calls for spending cuts totaling $12.5 billion, as well as a special election in June that would ask California voters to extend $9.3 billion of tax increases.
Brown has been at an impasse with Republicans, who have refused to support the five-year tax increases.
The alternative to the tax extensions is the gutting of public education, something Brown promised he would not do while attempting to bridge the state’s more than $25 billion budget shortfall.
For the city of Long Beach, however, the tax extensions have proven to be of little interest as elected, civic and business leaders have poured their time and energy into championing redevelopment, the elimination of which is one of, if not the, most contentious savings measure within the budget package.
That’s because about 40 percent of the city lies within a redevelopment project area, and the revitalization activities that take place in these areas provide close to 6,000 jobs a year and generate business revenue.
The state’s nearly 400 active redevelopment agencies spend a collective total of about $5.5 billion annually on such efforts. The governor’s plan includes these agencies being dissolved and the reprogramming of $1.7 billion that would have gone to redevelopment agencies next fiscal year to cover Medi-Cal and the courts system.
Councilman Robert Garcia highlighted various public improvement projects that are in various stages of planning or development that would be halted dead in their tracks: the building of a new library on the North side; a new police station for the East side; and new or rehabilitated park space throughout the city.
“A vote to eliminate redevelopment is a vote against the work of hundreds of community volunteers who have spent a decade planning, building and dreaming of a better Long Beach,” Garcia said.
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