177122 Resource 135547 120144 120144 1185408912886 1185409727809 Controlled Dirty Tactics at City Hall?

Santa Clarita City Council is making more enemies in the Newhall Redevelopment area.

<p>Well, the stories don't seem to stop on this one...</p><p>Another downtown Newhall business has been threatened with a lawsuit for supposed code violations in the area, and once again the business has been operating as-is for quite a while and there were no &quot;violations&quot; before the <a title="Old Town Newhall Redevelopment" href="item/166793" target="_blank">Newhall Redevelopment Plan</a> started being implemented.</p><p>The difference this time is that the business owner claims that the <a title="City of Santa Clarita" href="http://santa-clarita.com/" target="_blank">City of Santa Clarita</a> doesn't want his land, they just want his type of business, which is automotive-related, out of the area. Every time he applies for a permit to correct the supposed code violations, his permits are denied. And now the City's lawsuit has him believing that their sole intent is to force him out of business without paying him a dime for either his business or the property.</p><p>This isn't the first time that an automotive business has been hit with these supposed code violations in the downtown Newhall area, and it leaves us wondering what exactly is going on in there. Until this report, it's been clear that the actual land was going to be used for redevelopment, so the assumption was that the code violation lawsuits were being filed to devalue the businesses prior to the buy-out process. </p><p>Devaluing a business prior to buy-out is bad enough, but what about chasing an ongoing&nbsp;business out of town without paying them a dime? Seems the <a title="Santa Clarita City Council" href="http://www.santa-clarita.com/cityhall/council/" target="_blank">Santa Clarita City Council</a> cares more about their honked-up redevelopment plans than they do about the long-term residents and businesses in the area.</p><p>Redevelopment isn't necessarily a bad thing if done correctly, but here in <a title="Santa Clarita" href="http://santa-clarita.com/" target="_blank">Santa Clarita</a> it seems that the process is more oriented towards profit for the City (and the City Council members) than in actually improving the redevelopment area and retaining any existing goodwill in downtown Newhall. A better approach would be to involve the local business owners in the process instead of slamming them with nuisance lawsuits for code violations and eminent domain threats.</p> 9 application/xml false code violation downtown newhall eminent domain newhall redevelopment old town newhall santa clarita santa clarita city council Multi-part series on the Old Town Newhall Revitalization Plan. item/166793 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 3.1) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 lslocum false true false false true 181698 false false true false false false true 135547 blog blogsite/SantaClaritaRealEstate/web