"San Jacinto" has some notoriety in that it is the name of a mountain range, an earthquake fault and the valley containing Hemet, where the Ramona Pageant takes place, and the town of San Jacinto. It is this town of 24,000 people that sets the stage for the next round in the ongoing battle over Redevelopment. This concept of forced urban renewal is only about 30 years old here in California. Its original purpose of recombining small lots in run-down, blighted urban areas to assist in redevelopment that could not take place by private enterprise acting alone is seldom the reason for its use today. Cities want land to change ownership and want to promote construction of new buildings so they will get a new property tax base. They want new urban businesses for the increased sales tax. Redevelopment under the Health and Safety Code is now about money and property rights.
An important legal case developed when community redevelopment law ran headlong into the Williamson Act, the state’s farmland preservation law. Solano County wanted to take Margaret Emmington’s farm land to build a deep-water port facility. Because the land was designated agricultural under the Williamson Act, Emmington prevailed. This was a rather tenuous thread to preserve property rights, but any port in a storm....
Agricultural land is again the subject in San Jacinto. A new 3,885 acre redevelopment project, which includes 1,700 acres designated agricultural under the Williamson Act, was passed by their city’s Redevelopment Agency on December 28, just four days before the state redevelopment law revision expressly forbid this type of thing. Under this new law, previously undeveloped rural and farm land can not be put into project areas. San Jacinto’s move was clearly a grab for tax increment dollars as the city has been in "technical default" on previously issued bonds and needed the added projected income stream to cover debt service.
The area in question is along a river dike or levy and while the river is normally dry most of the year, it is subject to flash flooding. The city’s ostensible reason for including the land was to build flood control projects so that urban type projects can be built nearby. No one seems to be asking who is going to finance construction of these shopping centers in a known flood area. Even if the dike walls are concrete lined, they still can overflow; a fact people along the Mississippi can attest to. If they truly want flood control projects, they should issue bonds to finance them, not take money out of the general fund which is what they will be doing with a Redevelopment project.
This is exactly the type of abuse that helped cause the revision to Redevelopment law that went into effect on January 1. To protect these Williamson Act agricultural land contracts in San Jacinto’s Redevelopment Area, and ultimately throughout the state, two lawsuits have been filed.Both the California Farm Bureau and the California Conservation Department have filed to repeal San Jacinto’s ploy to sneak in under the old law.
It seems that even state agencies feel they must curb the cities’ insatiable appetites for property and sales taxes.