City Needs to Pay More Attention to Runaway RDA
City Needs to Pay More Attention to Runaway RDA
Editor,
Mr. Quilter’s dire predictions of cuts in city services in the event of a $2.7 million budget shortfall need not come to pass. You, the City Council, have a yearly revenue source that you have set aside, a sacred cow, the Redevelopment Agency (RDA).
Created by the City Council in 1983, the RDA skims off the city’s share of property tax revenues from new construction and sales of existing properties. The director of the RDA has recently told me that his agency now garners approximately $10 million in property tax revenues each year. This is tax money that would otherwise be available for the city’s general fund. You are running a $10 million annual RDA slush fund, out of the sight of the taxpayers, while threatening cuts to city services due to a $2.7 million budget shortfall.
What has your creation, the RDA, done with the taxpayers’ money?
It built the Briggs parking garage for $6 million in bonded indebtedness: true cost, about $12 million over 30 years. Six cars were parked in the garage last time I looked! The RDA paid a pretty penny to rebuild the Farmers’ and Merchants Bank: It’s a pretty building now, but it’s pretty darn empty. The cute little blue awnings along San Benito Street, together with the downtown sidewalk upgrades are RDA expenditures of dubious merit in a dying downtown. Tax money for low priority projects.
Clearly, the RDA has outstanding obligations, so not all of the yearly $10 million tax skim can be redirected, but when the RDA director told me that in addition to $13.5 million for the new sewer plant, the RDA planned grants for highway 25 and Hazel Hawkins Hospital, I understood that he had tax money looking to be spent.
I ask the city council to rein in its runaway creation, the RDA.
Reduce it to one clerk, under the supervision of the city treasurer, to account for its revenues, and pay its obligations. Return the balance of the skimmed off property tax revenues to the city’s general fund. Eliminate the RDA and Mr. Quilter’s city service cuts, as both are unnecessary.
John C. Buchanan
Hollister
Rail Shipping Is a Way to Go
Editor,
With Tuesday’s front page headline about passenger trains to San Benito County, it seems a good time to remind readers that one freight train gets more than 100 heavy trucks off of our roads. Yet the Union Pacific Coast line is operating at a fraction of its capacity. Perhaps the Council of Governments should focus on encouraging shipment by rail.
Robert Gilchrist Huenemann
Hollister
