Economics and Redevelopment Agencies

Happy Valentines Day Martinez! Okay now that I’m past the S.A.D. season of the year I’m raring to get on with it, and based on the looks of the new website, so is the Gazette. Speaking of the website, have you seen the poll asking residents their thoughts on a redevelopment agency? I am sure many of you have, and just as many of you have an opinion – yet only 23 people have chosen to make that opinion known.

When I first read the choices for the poll I admit I found it curious that there were folks who could honestly say they didn’t have enough information to voice an informed opinion. Then I logged into the library’s online research site and pulled up articles from Bay Area newspapers that had anything to say about redevelopment and the City of Martinez. Oh boy, six hundred and eighteen articles later, and these from the late ‘90’s through today, and I can see why folks might be left scratching their heads.

In a nutshell, the citizens of the City of Martinez have successfully blocked the formation of a redevelopment agency dating as far back as the ‘50’s. Many reasons given then seem to echo down through the decades, fear of irreversible changes to the small town charm and character, sprawl and traffic. According to my research until this last decade or so redevelopment was considered the ‘third rail’ in Martinez politics. However, proponents are now portrayed as scanning the obits with giddy anticipation. I suppose the thought here is the old guard is, well, exactly that.

For my part, I’m a limited government kinda gal. I’ll get into what I think about the whole ‘stimulus plan’ another time, but I will say that I think Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have a heck of a lot of huzpah. As most of you know I love digressions and well I haven’t indulged in, oh two months, so please allow me to digress.

I have a colleague who I worked with at a transportation company in San Francisco in the mid-nineties. Andrew went on to open his own company in San Jose about three years ago. I paid him a visit and over lunch we got into a heated debate over the then current state of the housing market. I let him know that I thought people who were taking advantage of the lax credit market and buying houses they couldn’t otherwise afford, without ‘creative financing vehicles’ were setting themselves up for a world of hurt. Andrew countered that interest only loans were a great financing tool (hey where have we heard that term before?) and as long as homeowners made their house payments on time and refinanced to a conventional loan before the original loan matured, everything would work out…

Now that the world economy has fallen prey to these creative financing vehicles, these tools, I personally had hoped people would think twice about spending money they didn’t have and leveraging the future of generations to come. But that is exactly what a redevelopment agency does.

In 2004 Measure M passed by a narrow margin. The measure, a toothless temperature gauge; asked city residents to weigh in on the formation of a redevelopment agency. After much wrangling and political posturing, our city government finally had what was interpreted as a mandate to get the redevelopment ball rolling.

However, as history has shown, Martinez doesn’t go quietly into that dark night. A group of citizens blocked the City Council from forming the agency by gathering enough signatures to ensure the citizens of Martinez the right to a vote.

That vote never happened. Instead the council decided to incorporate language into the agency’s charter limiting the use of eminent domain, seeking to once and for all silence opposition and allow the formation of an agency to move forward without a general election, which is what over three thousand residents had demanded in 2004.

That was then, when housing was a growth market and politicians could get away with fifteen second sound bites in response to community concerns. Now, when bay area housing is seeing double digit depreciation, big name businesses are closing at alarming rates and the State Legislature has raided $350 million of redevelopment agency monies to backfill the state’s general fund, is not the time for the City of Martinez to travel down this primrose path.

But then the City has fought this fight for over fifty years. Remind me what is it they say about doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?