(Editor’s note: The following op-ed was submitted to the Long Beach Post by Sen. Alan Lowenthal’s office on January 11, 2012. We reprint it below in its entirety.)
11:00am | by Alan Lowenthal | As a former Long Beach City Council member, I have seen the benefits and abuses of RDA firsthand.
In fact, as originally envisioned and created in the 1950s, redevelopment agencies have done many great things to support urban renewal and address urban blight in communities across California.
While Long Beach may have been an example of redevelopment done right–from the downtown Art Exchange, to the Admiral Kidd community center, to the creation of affordable housing in some of the most challenged areas of the city–in too many instances statewide reasoned redevelopment had simply become unchecked development.
In good economic times, this was not a major concern. However, unlike the boom years of redevelopment, our state now faces unprecedented financial challenges in the form of the Great Recession and our economy’s slow recovery.
Government services at every level have been forced to tighten their belts in this new economic reality, and the state’s 425 redevelopment agencies were no exception. Proposition 22, approved by voters in 2010, defined the various slices of the property tax pie and mandated a set percentage of collected property taxes go toward redevelopment. However, while defining and protecting the RDA slice of the property tax pie, the language of the proposition did nothing to protect the existence of the actual redevelopment agencies.
Governor Brown, faced with the prospect of slashing school budgets, decided instead to abolish the RDAs in his 2011-12 budget. In approving this budget, the Legislature was put into the unenviable position of deciding between reducing education funding even further or keeping RDAs alive.
I, along with a majority of the Legislature, chose our students. The impact on the state’s RDAs was an unfortunate consequence of a difficult choice–but a choice I would certainly make again, given the circumstances.
Compounding the problem and despite warnings of the potential fallout, cities statewide sued over the RDA decision. Earlier this month, the state Supreme Court ruled that not only could the state shift property taxes previously going to RDAs to our state’s schools, but due to language in Prop. 22, the Legislature could not reconstitute the RDAs.
There are plenty of fingers to point on how we wound up in this situation. The critical issue before us, however, is not how we got here, but how we move forward. The cities and the Legislature must come together to work on a way to provide for the original mission of redevelopment–namely, the elimination of urban blight and the creation of affordable housing–while still assuring that our schools are properly funded.
There is no doubt that it will be a painful process to achieve this goal, but the only way we can hope to achieve it is together. Cooperation is what is required now, not further acrimony or litigation. The Legislature cannot do it alone, and on the other hand, neither can the cities.