The Santa Clarita City Council is set to take action on its official opposition to Proposition 98, the California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act, at tonight's City Council Meeting. One of the issues that the Santa Clarita City Council uses as an excuse for opposing Proposition 98 is the fact that it phases out local rent-control ordinances. Why should the local City Council be concerned about this, since we don't have rent control in the Santa Clarita area? The City also takes the position that the Proposition 98 provisions may prohibit the government "from constructing public water projects, enacting land use regulations to protect the environment, and invalidate regulations intended to protect the public's health,safety and welfare." Say, what? This is certainly a unique twist to the wording of Proposition 98. So what provisions does Proposition 98 include? The main opposition to this proposition are in regards to limiting a government entity's ability to seize private property via the eminent domain process. More specifically, it states that "Property may not be taken by government and then used for the same purpose that it was used for prior to seizure. For example, if residential housing is taken, the government cannot then use it for residential housing" according to Ballotpedia's summary of the propostion. And that, in a nutshell, is why the City of Santa Clarita opposes it. Let's look at Downtown (Old Town) Newhall and the current eminent domain proceedings there. We have retail buildings along Spruce Street that are being "bought" by the City under threat of eminent domain (or pending ghost town, depending on your point of view), in order to build a proposed library there. There is no guarantee of a library, so in all likelihood the City will be building new retail and office space in the area once the current occupants are removed. In this case, the Proposition 98 provisions would come into play, since they would be taking retail properties and converting them to "new" retail properties instead of to another use. Clearly the City of Santa Clarita wants to be able to exercise as much authority as possible when invoking eminent domain provisions, but is this what the taxpayers really want? Do we want to give our City Council carte blanche authority to take privately-owned properties at will, just to hand them off to some as-yet-unknown developer? Given the recent FormsGate scandal and the many accusations flying about various City Council members (and hopefuls) about how much they seem to be in developer's pockets, I would think that the residents of the City of Santa Clarita would want to limit this "taking" of property to a more reasonable level. If you don't want to give the Santa Clarita City Council carte blanche authority to seize property, attend tonight's City Council meeting and let your voice be heard! | 
