The Daily Briefing

TWELVE MORE YEARS OF EMINENT DOMAIN IN NORTH LONG BEACH? TELL ‘EM WHAT YOU THINK

Theo DouglasTue. September 16
 

Should the city’s Redevelopment Agency get 12 more years to exercise eminent domain in North Long Beach? You can help decide, at tonight’s Long Beach City Council meeting.

But when the Redevelopment Agency board voted yesterday to ask the council for an extension–at its meeting tonight–several audience members were on hand to give board members an earful. Turns out they weren’t pleased at the prospect of extending eminent domain.

“By virtue of this meeting alone our properties are now even lower because you have now said that their properties are possibly going to be touched by you folks,” Long Beach resident David Gomez told the RDA board, according to a story on the Press-Telegram website.

“We can no longer get what the market would be worth for our homes because now this meeting has said to anybody that’s a potential buyer, `You don’t want to buy this property because it would be seized at any time.’ “

The council won’t actually vote on the RDA’s request for an extension tonight–and no: an extension still wouldn’t mean the RDA could take single-family homes for private development. Proposition 99 reportedly guards against that.

Tonight is just a hearing on the matter, and since it’s Hearing No. 3, near the top of the calendar for the council’s 5 p.m. meeting, you’d better get there at 5 p.m. (The council meets in Council Chambers at City Hall, 333 W. Ocean Blvd.)

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  • Mike Ruehle
    Why would an apartment or business owner in north Long Beach invest more than the minimum required to operate the business or rent the apartment for fear of losing their capital investment? Redevelopment areas actually create blight by encouraging minimal investment in the area.
  • Frankenfeld
    Granted Proposition 99 protects residential property owners from having their homes seized through eminent domain for non-public uses, provided the RDA pays fair market value as protected in Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution, blah, blah, blah, blah....

    The real issue is that all the North Long Beach residences located in the Redevelopment project area should be taken out of the redevelopment area and regarded as residential areas of the city. The dirty secret is that the entire property tax assessments of those homes is money that exclusively goes to the RDA, to give us wonderful projects like the Downtown Plaza, the City West Gateway, and numerous landscaped street medians. All this property tax assessment is at the entire expense of where it would go otherwise: The LBUSD, the county, and the city general fund--police, fire, parks and recreation, libraries and infrastructure.

    Isn't redevelopment wonderful?
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