"Get Lost!" letters sent to many Newhall businesses.

Businesses near the corner of Lyons and San Fernando Road received letters this week from the City of Santa Clarita threatening the use of Eminent Domain if they don’t readily accept the City’s offers to "voluntarily" vacate their properties.

Eminent domain, according to Wikipedia, means "the inherent power of the state to seize a citizen’s private property, expropriate private property, or rights in private property, without the owner’s consent". Or, in plain English, the City can seize anyone’s property for any reason, and they don’t have to justify that they have a bona-fide reason to do so. Strong-arming, in other words.

Each property owner received a phone call (some received them at home), then a regular letter indicating that their properties were being appraised for eminent domain, followed by a certified letter a day later threatening legal action if the businesses failed to accept the offered "appraised value" in short order. And all notices were received within a 3-day time frame.

Included in this notification process were businesses along Spruce Street (White Light Chiropractic Center, Antique Flower Garden, and the landlords for Just Passing Through Body Piercing) as well as CarQuest Auto Parts at the corner of San Fernando Road and 11th Street. Prior to this notice, the owners of the Antique Flower Garden had been told that their building would be spared due to its apparent historical status, but it would appear that has now been revoked.

This area is the quadrant targeted for a new 65,000 square foot library building, which according to reliable sources, Los Angeles County cannot afford to staff or stock with books even if it was built at no cost to the County. In light of the recent approval of the much needed library for the Acton / Agua Dulce area, it would seem even less likely now that the proposed Newhall library would be something that Los Angeles County would be able to manage in the forseeable future. Especially since there already is a library nearby in Newhall, as well as one in nearby Valencia.

The new library building is supposed to be the cornerstone of the Old Town Newhall Revitalization Plan, marking off the start of the revitalization area. This whole plan is geared towards increasing retail sales (as in sales tax dollars) in the area, and it clearly revolves around chasing out any non-retail businesses as well as most of the supposedly "locals-only" retail businesses in the Newhall area.

A study of the proposed retail developments for the Newhall area, called the Retail Opportunities Analysis, was completed as of December 2006 and was released to the public recently. More will follow on this highly flawed study in a series of separate posts on this blog.

This first step in strong-arming local businesses to vacate the Downtown Newhall area is a sure sign that the City of Santa Clarita has no concern whatsoever as to how the existing businesses will survive the upheaval they will be creating with the Old Town Newhall Revitalization Project. The business owners are being given no time and no assistance in relocating out of the redevelopment area at this point, and they expect that the "appraised values" of their businesses will be way short of what will be needed to relocate and re-establish themselves elsewhere in Santa Clarita.

Other cities that have gone through a similar redevelopment process (such as Glendale) have done it in a more gradual and planned manner, buying up properties as they became available and then using eminent domain on the few that remained. Santa Clarita has apparently decided that they don’t need to worry about the local economy in the short term, as long as they can push through their hopped-up plans for the redevelopment zone in the long term.

In a March 25 article in The Signal, Paul Brotzman, the City’s Director for Community Development, stated that the City didn’t get the proposals that they expected from potential developers because there "were uncertainties in the redevelopment plan - namely, if the city could guarantee that parcels would be assembled and available for redevelopment projects." So, now that the City is showing that they do indeed intend to exercise their muscles in invoking eminent domain, will they "completely cover the costs of the relocation to comparable facilities" as Brotzman promised?  Although Brotzman has stated that "those costs include not only moving costs, but the cost of acquiring another facility for those businesses", the local business owners are very skeptical that this promise will be carried out. According to the local business owners, the City has been entirely unresponsive to their relocation needs thus far.

Rumors are rampant that the City representatives are so personally vested in this planned development that all they are interested in is their own pocketbooks. Will they prove us wrong by not investing in this redevelopment plan personally, or will they attempt to hide it by using shell corporations to mask their ownership interests?

More to follow on this… stay tuned for a complete review (or is it flaming?) of the Retail Opportunities Analysis.

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