John Chiang Audit Hammers California Redevelopment Agencies: Millions of Dollars Gone from Affordable Housing Funds

By Jill Stewart Tue., Mar. 8 2011 at 12:22 PM

Is this California's definition of "blight" if the neighbors are too sick or too fat?

Update: The Los Angeles City Council is deciding today whether to hide $1 billion in redevelopment cash from Governor Jerry Brown.

Few overweight or sickly Californians ever knew that the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency tried to gin up a state law defining "blight," by bizarrely expanding "blight" to include streets with lots of sick or fat residents.

Assembly Bill 2531 was an Orwellian fright law. It was ghostwritten by the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency and pushed by Felipe Fuentes, the "worst legislator in California." This week, the slime got thicker: State Controller John Chiang's audit says the Los Angeles redevelopment agency wrongly slipped $883,000 out of an affordable housing fund in 2010, blowing it on "administrative fees." And Chiang warns he barely looked under the hood:

Chiang found in his quick audit of 18 RDA entities (Redevelopment Agencies) statewide, including the big and powerful one in Los Angeles, that many are not keeping proper books and none has a clue or can prove how many real jobs they have created.

And L.A.'s redevelopment agency is diverting scads of money out of its Low and Moderate Income Housing Fund -- $883,000 in 2010 alone -- and into bureaucratic overhead having nothing to do with building housing. Wrongly. Inappropriately. Illegally.

Chiang warns that the nearly $1 million he found is probably just the tip of the iceberg because Los Angeles city officials admit to him that they've been making these improper transfers for several years.

Chiang says:

These items were identified through a very limited review of transactions and a more thorough audit could uncover additional ineligible charges.

So surprised to hear that! But the truth is, nobody with any real power is watching the CRA. In Los Angeles, only the bloggers -- like citywatchla, and Village to Village and MayorSam, and RonKayeLA -- try to keep the agency clean.

That's just not enough.

This bad news about what's been going on at the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency comes as Governor Jerry Brown moves forward with his plan to do away with RDAs in California.

Brown wants to wipe them all out.

Brown wants to take away the $5 billion in public funds that the state's rich redevelopment agencies now control, diverting the money to help with state and county cutbacks in indigent health care, welfare programs, schools and the like.

Greedy California redevelopment agencies got outed by Controller John Chiang

Who will miss RDAs the most? Developers addicted to public subsidies for "redevelopment" and California's city-level politicians whose city council campaigns are heavily greased by the same developers that the grateful local politicians later help in return -- by subsidizing their development projects with RDA loot.

So keep this in mind, given Chiang's disturbing findings showing little accountability in many of the 18 RDAs he spot-checked:

If Los Angeles political and civic leaders including Eric Garcetti, Antonio Villaraigosa and Christine Essel had gotten their way in 2010, Felipe Fuentes' sweeping new definition of "blight" in California under AB 2531 -- a legal definition that's used to institute eminent domain proceedings and tear down homes, schools and businesses -- would have included all California neighborhoods where residents are deemed too sick or too fat.

The law making fat folks and people with lung disease or diabetes the new definition of blight passed the California State Legislature. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a lucid moment, vetoed it.

Tags:

audit, corruption, CRA, John Chiang, Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, RDA

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Mikijackson

The City Council, otherwise known as the CRA Council voted to put a billion dollars of tax payer money in a paper bag and give it to rich developers today. A bad habit they have. Let the lawsuits begin.

This meeting was not a legal meeting. Everything done there may well be reversed by an inevitable lawsuit/s. The Democrats on who went ahead and voted for it are taking a big chance, not enough to over rule their greed and need for their developer owner's money, but enough that they did not look like happy people.

Proving Tip O'Neil's saying that all politics are local, they opted to please the local top elected Democrat, Mayor Antonio and his puppeteers the downtown money masters. To do this they are slapping state top Dem Governor Jerry Brown. Tough choices these for politicians who want it all. Resentful City hallers characterized Antonio as pushing Council members to "fight on" - right into the mouth of a mass of law suits that promise to tangle this up for a very long time.

Of course Brown had already slapped the Playboy Mayor and his rag tag Council in the face by negotiating the terms for an end to the CRA with Supervisor Yaroslavsky, earlier this week, going right over City Hall heads to the official adult of LA Democratic Politics, or as close to one as it gets here.

The brighter bulbs at City Hall, not that there are enough of them to read a Jackie Susanne novel in large print type to, know there they will probably lose in the end. The strategy is to tie everything up and siphon off whatever they can in the meantime, while keeping the Governor's hands off the billion. Of course, that means keeping it away from services taxpayers need, like schools, fire, police, libraries...closing the deficits, but who cares? Not our tireless public servants.

They wound up having to do this so half a**ed because they held the first CRA meeting without obeying the Brown Act. Caught in the act by community activists they had to re-do the CRA meeting Monday. By then they got wind of the deal with Yaroslavsky and feared Brown could freeze the money this Thursday - so the clock was ticking. Even though today was election day and there was push back from Council, there was no choice - they had to do it today, with or without the legal niceties. It became a renegade "special meeting". Real special.

The City functionaries apparently wrote notice of the meeting on the back of a matchbook and taped it to the wall in the lobby of City Hall on Saturday. As everyone knows City Hall lobby is a favorite Saturday destination of Angelenos looking to have a good time. Notice of the meeting didn't hit the internet until around 11:am Sunday. You can't say they didn't do their best to keep the public out, or the part of the public they didn't want at the meeting out.

The usually nearly empty room (proof LA residents are not as crazy as reputed) was packed to the rafters with a very special crowd for the special meeting. CRA flacks burned up the phone lines and cranked out masses of emails to get their "supporters" to the meeting to testify to the glories and wonder of the CRA. Unfortunately at no time during these 2 minute accolades was anyone asked if they benefited financially or otherwise from the CRA...or would benefit if these projects got funded.

Even so, a substantial number of them alluded to various kinds of CRA benefits. This isn't counting the few actual citizen supporters who showed up. Some of us (cynics no doubt) suspect most of these sincere folks weren't informed by the CRA of the full ramifications of what was happening. There were some cynics who thought it amounted to CRA flacks exploiting little old ladies and struggling families, but they've just had too much experience with City Hall.

Many CRA employees showed up, their jobs are on the line. The deals cut by CRA honchos hung the rest of the workers out to dry. Plenty of other City workers have lost or will lose jobs since the billion won't come back to the city anytime soon in the form of paying for the services, like firefighting and teaching, those employees provide. Nice job City weasels - pitting employee against employee...and the unions came down in favor of , bug surprise, the CRA. Nothing like loyalty. You could say their jobs were "eminent domained for private gain" by the CRA. Whose gain - look no farther than CRA honchos, the CRA's list of projects and fat cats who benefit from them and the Council CRA supporters.

Municipal employees shouldn't be surprised, if they don't know who they work for, it's time they wised up. They are being treated just like what they are, working people. Working people are being kicked to the curb more often these days the ball in a game of street stick ball. It's the favorite game of the top dogs no matter where they are, Wall Street, Washington DC or Spring Street. It's someone's American Dream, not mine, but someone's.

So now we proceed to the modern LA Bleak House of attorney enrichment. CRA mastermind attorney Murray Kane has already gotten a jump on this by getting $700,000 of that CRA money, for his legal "services". You see, the lawyers win no matter what. It's only us suckers who lose.

Mikijackson

Let the lawsuits begin.

This meeting was not a legal meeting. Everything done there may well be reversed by an inevitable lawsuit/s.

CRA employees showed up, their jobs are on the line. The deals cut by CRA honchos hung the rest of the workers out to dry. You could say their jobs were "eminent domained for private gain" by the CRA. Workers took it in the chops again.