Here’s what we’re reading today:
- Oakland budget cuts his zoo, Children’s Fairyland – from the San Francisco Chronicle: “In all, more than $28 million will be sliced from the budget, mostly from the $388 million general fund. The cuts are due to the loss of redevelopment funds, which Oakland used to fund services and programs across the city. ‘It’s not clean and neat. We wish it were,’ said Mayor Jean Quan. ‘For California’s older, larger cities, like Oakland, losing these redevelopment funds has been very, very tough.'”
- Redevelopment Agencies Facing Default – from Cal Watchdog: “The Legislation canceled the RDAs’ tax increment-financing, which served as their piggy-bank under the Community Redevelopment Law for the past 65 years. The California Legislature and its crony capitalist allies will desperately try to resurrect new tax and economic incentives to reclaim their ability to interfere in the California real estate markets.”
- Board members mourn ending of Santa Rosa’s redevelopment agency – from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “‘I think it’s a real sad day for this community and other communities up and down the state of California,’ said board member Steve Burke, the city’s former director of redevelopment and housing. The final meeting of an agency whose operations were not well understood by the general public was, not surprisingly, sparsely attended. Board members were joined by a handful of staffers, one member of the media and a single member of the public, an affordable housing advocate named Gregory Fearon, who did not speak.Danielle O’Leary, the city’s economic development director, said she was disappointed not to see any signs of support from the public. ‘Given the magnitude of how those programs touch people, it was kind of hard not to see any champions in the audience,’ O’Leary said.”
- State of the State speech mostly about playing nice – from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser: “The state is moving on course, Abercrombie said in his 51-minute speech, because the public workers took pay cuts and reduced benefits. ‘To all of you who came to work each day bearing the burden of cuts and slashes to your programs for the past three years, and to those of you who gave up furloughs because of your commitment to serving Hawaii’s people, I thank you. ‘Mahalo plenty to each and every one of you,’ Abercrombie said. If there was a spare ‘mahalo plenty’ for the scores of businesses that saw their taxes rise, or the taxpayers who will soon start filling out tax forms without benefit of all those state deductions, Abercrombie did not drop that mahalo on the taxpaying masses. If you work for state government, yesterday’s speech was all about you — but if you are in private business, you were mentioned tangentially, at best.”