Redevelopment in Suisun City: The Issue Overview

During the last 20 years, redevelopment and Suisun City have gone hand in hand. Now in 2011, the city’s redevelopment agency faces its biggest threat yet: Gov. Jerry Brown.

When he first got into office, Brown called for the end of redevelopment agencies, and still calls for their elimination despite a failed vote in the state Senate earlier this year.

Brown’s recently-released May budget revision still includes the call to end redevelopment agencies and take back $2 billion in property tax revenue Brown says the program forces the state to backfill to schools and other core services.

In his May revision, Brown said redevelopment’s effectiveness on a statewide level was “questionable.”

But in Suisun City, where a redevelopment zone covers the vast majority of the town, officials are up in arms about the threat to the city’s redevelopment funds. Officials here say those monies are vital to complete the process begun in the late 1980s, and finish transforming a once-derided waterfront into a thriving community of businesses that contribute to the city’s tax base.

Click on this link to watch a video about the start of redevelopment in Suisun City.

Redevelopment projects dot the city from east to west.  At the eastern end, redevelopment money helped build the baseball fields at the Lambrecht Sports Complex. Moving west, the Suisun City Library was built in part with redevelopment money as was the 333 Sunset Avenue office building and the Joseph Nelson Community Center.

But nowhere are redevelopment’s changes more profound than downtown, where the train station, Hampton Inn Waterfront Suites, Harbor One Center office building, docks, City Hall and Harbor Square building were all completed with help from redevelopment financing.

Likewise, Suisun City institutions like Bab’s Delta Diner and the Athenian Grill owe their current locations to redevelopment planning and financing. (Click to watch video)

WHAT IS REDEVELOPMENT?

According to the California Department of Finance — currently a foe of redevelopment — redevelopment is a financing structure that takes roughly 12 percent of property tax revenues and is designed to eliminate blight and build affordable housing.

Lawmakers first voted in 1945 to allow local governments to create redevelopment agencies, then greatly expanded redevelopment agency laws in 1951.

Part of redevelopment agency financing is a kind of bet on the predicted increase in property values over time that redevelopment projects will give to a redevelopment zone.

For example, an agency might demolish an abandoned warehouse and build an apartment building in its place. The property tax value of the apartment building would likely be higher than the property tax value of the warehouse.

According to a recent city presentation to lawmakers, the redevelopment agency receives the percentage of property taxes that rise above those of warehouse before it was demolished, or what’s called the “tax increment.”

Current laws require an agency to show debt before it can collect on tax increments, and prohibits agencies from using their money to provide assistance to auto dealers or relocation help for big box retailers.

UP NEXT: JERRY BROWN'S CASE AGAINST REDEVELOPMENT