As a follow-up to the discussion of abolition of redevelopment in California, don’t miss a piece by Bill Fulton and Josh Stephens, Redevelopment Will Be Back — But At What Price? in the California Planning & Development Report of December 29, 2011 – click here: http://www.cp-dr.com/node/3081
It’s an interesting review/forecast of what redevelopment groupies are planning to do (and in Fulton’s opinion are going to do) to get the despised California redevelopment process to rise Lazaruslike from the dead. It’s a good way to gain an insight into the thinking of the political-redevelopment complex that for decades has been looting the public treasury in California for private gain, wasting king’s ransoms in public funds in the process of making inept and at times corrupt deals that often failed to produce the promised redevelopment and at times produced nothing at all in spite of spending gazillions of public dollars, and leaving behind a bonded redevelopment indebtednes running into the high tens of billions of dollars.
What we find fascinating about Fulton’s position is that his discussion fails to address the use and misuse of eminent domain by redevelopment agencies, the waste and misuse of public funds, and — even as he speculates about the nature of the deal to be made to resurrect redevelopment — how to produce safeguards that would protect the rights of individuals who are victimized by the process and prevent a repetition of the looting of public funds for private gain that characterized the old redevelopment system. All these guys seem to care about is money, and the hell with the moral and civic values that were routinely trampled in the old redevelopment process.
Check it out for yourself.