Only those “resources” are being repackaged as opportunities for small businesses as “financial preparation.”

Here is the memo:

Sacramento Hosts Free Workshop Connecting Small Businesses to Resources

Half-day workshop will feature info on social media, marketing and financial preparation.

Story: 

The City of Sacramento, in partnership with local property and business improvement districts, the County of Sacramento, and the area chambers of commerce, has planned a free workshop that will connect small businesses to resources and information to help them thrive and prosper. More than 350 small business owners are slated to attend. 

• When/Where: 
• Friday, June 8 from 7:30 to 11:45 a.m. at the Woodlake Hotel, 500 Leisure Lane.
• Who: 
• Opening remarks will be made by Sacramento City Manager John Shirey. The workshop will feature an update on the state of the local economy by economic developer Ryan Sharp and two information sessions focusing on marketing and social media strategies and financing preparation. 
• Background: 
• As part of the City of Sacramento Economic Development Department’s Business Visit Program, staff has conducted outreach efforts over the years to engage businesses in key commercial corridors. After reaching out to more than 3000 businesses, the feedback received was used to develop the Sacramento Business First Workshop.

But a little digging shows other meeting information…

“Learn from the pros on how to effectively and efficiently get prepared to seek financing and capital for your business,” a meeting notice claims. 

What’s most interesting is that the notice links to a registration for the meeting, but the meeting “registration is closed.”

Oh my. Sacramento business owners should show up in droves and sign up for financial assistance, just out of curiosity.

Redevelopment agencies were abolished by Gov. Jerry Brown, not out of any sense of eradicating waste of improper spending of taxpayer funds–Brown saw the huge chunk of redevelopment money as a way to help plug holes in the state budget without cutting much else.

The California Redevelopment Agency still maintains its website and actively advocates for redevelopment spending.

In a recent Senate Sub Committee #4 hearing, League of California Cities Legislative Director Dan Carrigg “pointed out that over the past few months a number of bills have been introduced in the Legislature designed to address some of the problems with AB 1 x 26, while still providing the state with budget relief,” the California Redevelopment Agency said.

“AB 1585 (Pérez), SB 986 (Dutton) and SB 1335 (Pavley), SB 1151 (Steinberg) and SB 1156 (Steinberg), all offer a policy-centered approach to these issues. These legislative proposals recognize that redevelopment agencies offered value to California, and not just in the dollars the state reaped for its budget deficit,” the CRA website states.

“Carrigg concluded his remarks by asking the committee members to consider what is in the best interest of California’s economy,” the CRA reported. “We urge the Legislature not to take the aggressive approach proposed by the department of Finance but work through the issues in a more balanced way that allows retention of assets and projects that make policy sense while achieving budget savings for the state.”

Really?

Under the CRA’s “Current Year Legislative Tools and News,” the CRA states “this page is currently being developed.”

It doesn’t appear that the redevelopment agency has really ended.

I’m still giddy after the California Supreme Court ruled last month that the state had every right to shut down those noxious enemies of property rights and fiscal responsibility — redevelopment agencies. Better yet, the state’s high court ruled that another law that allowed those agencies to come back into existence was unconstitutional.

As of February, anyway, redevelopment is dead in California, the victim of an absurdly arrogant legal and political strategy pursued by redevelopment’s chief defenders. This is wonderful news, made even better by the teeth-gnashing of public officials who have routinely abused their powers under redevelopment law. Cry me a river.

But before I gloat too much, we need to remember that this victory already resembles one of those cheap horror movies where the Evil Thing has been vanquished, and all appears well, then its hand pokes out from the grave just as the credits begin.

No one gives up riches and power without a fight, so redevelopment lobbyists already are crafting new legislation to replace the dead agencies with new, revised versions. (Meanwhile, successor agencies will pay off old debt, and old projects will go on to completion. Many of those projects and property transfers slapped together after the law killing redevelopment agencies, or RDAs, was passed will be audited by the state controller, stopped or tied up in litigation. Many RDA officials, thankfully, will be out of work.) The fight goes on but I never would have expected such progress.

One of my earliest memories as a newly hired editorialist at the Register in the late 1990s was meeting with local property-rights activists in a parking lot outside a subsidized shopping mall project and looking at their charts explaining why a process called “redevelopment” was such a problem. As we gawked at the fruits of redevelopment’s corporate welfare, they explained how these urban-renewal agencies float debt without accountability and routinely misuse eminent domain, government’s power to seize private property for supposedly public purposes.

Days of Despair

As I plunged deeply into the issue, I never forgot that sense of near-hopelessness I felt in that parking lot. I never forgot the despair I saw on the faces of homeowners in Garden Grove as they begged the city to scotch a quietly hatched plan that would have driven them out of their middle-class neighborhood so that the city could market the land to a theme-park developer that was yet to be determined.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed victims of eminent domain, many of them immigrant small-business owners who couldn’t believe what was happening to them in America. They were bullied, put out of business and forced to spend years battling City Hall rather than building a better life.

The general public learned of the injustices after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo vs. City of New London, in Connecticut, which upheld the “right” of governments to use eminent domain for redevelopment-type economic projects. The grand revitalization project that destroyed homeowner Susette Kelo’s Connecticut neighborhood was abandoned, and the site remains a dumping ground. It serves as a reminder that officials in the United States can’t plan an economy any better than their equivalents in the old Soviet empire. Free markets work better than bureaucratic central planning.

I’ve seen how the redevelopment process has distorted economic markets and made it more difficult for people without political connections to build their businesses and their dreams. Redevelopment embodies crony capitalism, but there’s so much money in it, with so many consultants and politicians who benefit from it, that I never dreamed of the day when it could actually go away. Who would have thought that redevelopment agencies would be the ones on the outside looking in, scheming for new ways to regain some power and privilege?

Redevelopment officials are so used to getting their way with average citizens that they figured it would be no problem giving state elected officials the back of their hand. The seeds of their demise were sown after former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger attempted to divert some of their funds to fill part the perpetual state budget hole.

Diversion Scheme

Redevelopment — which morphed decades ago from a mechanism to fight urban blight into a scheme to divert county and state taxes to cities — is a creation of the state, so the governor argued that the state had the right to take some money. The League of California Cities and the California Redevelopment Association struck back with Proposition 22, approved by voters in November 2010, which forbade state diversions of redevelopment funds. It was sold to the public as a means to stop Sacramento politicians’ raids on local road funds.

The blight barons were gloating after their big victory, but then Gov. Jerry Brown came up with a work-around. He signed a law that shut down RDAs. After all, Prop. 22 can’t stop a raid on funds of agencies that no longer exist. And then he also signed a law that allowed the agencies to come back to power after paying funds to the state.

The redevelopment community challenged both laws and was pleased when the high court agreed to review them. But redevelopment advocates were stunned by the unanimous ruling that found that the Legislature was perfectly within its authority to abolish agencies that it had created. The justices also ruled 6-1 that agencies cannot buy their way back into existence because that violates Prop. 22, the very initiative the RDAs had crafted. How sweet is that reasoning?

I celebrated one recent night at philanthropist Moe Mohanna’s downtown Sacramento Oddfellows building. Many in this odd group of activists on the left and right, including Mohanna, had been abused by redevelopment agencies. We ate Persian food and savored the rare victory for the good guys. But we realized that redevelopment is, as the Monty Python troupe once said, “not quite dead.”

Let’s hope coalitions emerge this year to keep this Evil Thing in its grave.

— Steven Greenhut

“Council members voted 8-1 in a closed session to approve John Shirey to the high profile, volatile job…” CBS news reported.

Shirey currently works in Sacramento as top dog of an agency looking deep into the abyss, after passage of Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget bill to kill redevelopment agencies in the state.

But Shirey fought back after Brown first proposed the agency elimination, albeit using a weak argument. At a committee hearing last Spring, Shirey claimed that the governor’s proposal was unconstitutional — even after State Finance Director Anna Matosantos said there was no unconstitutionality at all with the proposal, and guaranteed that it was “within the legal limits to eliminate an agency.”

And after it appeared that Brown’s budget cutting measure was growing legs, Shirey was at the helm watching as redevelopment agencies throughout the state began approving projects at record speed, increasing bond indebtedness and state obligation.

Fortunately, Sacramento’s Mayor Kevin Johnson,was not enamored of Shirey’s candidacy, as his was the only “no” vote in yesterday’s closed council session.

Sacramento has a long history of questionable publicly funded redevelopment projects, as well as preferential treatment for a few local developers. And the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency is not one of the redevelopment agencies working on altruistic cleanup projects, as many proponents try to claim.

Most recently completed redevelopment projects in Sacramento include the controversial “Dive Bar,” also known as the Mermaid Bar on the blighted and crime laden K Street Mall. The owners of the Mermaid Bar received more than $6 million in total redevelopment subsidies, which they used to build the bar on the downtown mall.

And as head of California’s redevelopment agency, Shirey has had a key role in the fight against eminent domain reform –  practices which use extortion tactics to often intimidate and eventually grab privately-owned properties more cheaply.

Even State Treasurer Bill Lockyer said at a Spring hearing that he supported Brown’s proposal, and called redevelopment agencies “vampire agencies sucking blood from everyone around them.”

After Brown’s proposal, the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported, “Redevelopment agencies lack some of the key accountability and transparency elements common to other local agencies. Specifically, unlike other local agencies, redevelopment agencies can incur debt without voter approval.”

So while the Brown most definitely did the right thing eliminating the “vampire agencies,” Sacramento City Council members showed their lack of leadership and weaknesses, while hiring a time-tested bureaucrat for the important job.

An interesting aside was the absence of reporting on this big Sacramento news. The local CBS television news channel reported the story last evening on the 10:00 p.m. news. But there was no mention of candidate Shirey or the city council vote in today’s print version of the Sacramento Bee.  The Bee story went online today at 11:15 a.m, nearly 12 hours later.

JULY 21, 2011