Points in favor of Hamilton
By Dwayne Hunn
MARIN VOICE
Dwayne Hunn is assistant executive director of Novato Ecumenical Housing
and co-director of the North Bay
Transportation Management Association
Opponents
of the Hamilton project have used their interpretation of Novato’s
redevelopment agency financing to lure supporters to their camp. They would
benefit by contemplating Arthur Vandenberg's wise words from the past.
It is less important to redistribute wealth
than it is to redistribute opportunity. If the Hamilton project is rejected by
the voters in June, the costs of doing business as usual will continue, forcing
long Sonoma commutes that gridlock Highway 101, depriving the region of increasing
and balancing the supply of jobs with affordable housing, and weakening the
possibilities of making the train economically viable on the Northwestern
Pacific right of way.
Rejecting the Hamilton project will force us
to find more expensive means "to redistribute wealth to regain those lost
opportunities in the future.” From this perspective I address some of the issues
raised by the opponents.
The 400-plus acres purchased by Berg and
Revoir for $45 million will be a master planned community. Opponents compare
Hamilton to non-master planned communities where haphazard, piecemeal
development at higher densities has occurred.
The Hamilton project calls for 215 acres to
have 2,550 housing units, about 12 units per acre. Seventy acres have been set
aside for parks, open space, lighted ball fields and so on. Woven throughout
the project are bike and walking-running paths.
Hamilton Field’s boarded-up barracks, unused
and rundown hangars and decaying underground utilities make it a blighted,
stagnant area. Hamilton generates no tax revenue to the city of Novato, which
has the lowest tax revenue per person of any city in the nine Bay Area
counties.
In 1985 the use of redevelopment agency bond
financing was an option available to the purchaser. Then, the cost estimates to
improve the freeway and frontage road and to add interchanges (which until the
Hamilton project have never been required of a private developer) were S7
million. In 1988, those cost estimates are $24 million.
The costs to
totally replace sewers, electrical and water utilities, drainage and flood
control improvements —which benefit the extended region in which Hamilton lies,
including the Lanham Village, the
mobile home park and the Hamilton School — also increased.
When these escalating redevelopment costs
were added to the $33 million of Berg-Revoir site improvement costs, financial
logic dictated that available redevelopment agency bond financing be
requested.
Opponents claim that using redevelopment
financing will steal Novato taxpayers’ dollars. The law says:
“Blighted areas are an economic and social drag upon the community and it is good public business to
eliminate them. By the adoption of this constitutional amendment, it will be
made possible for the property to pay its own way and ifnance the cost of
redevelopment without any additional levy upon the already overburdened
taxpayers.”
Project opponents claim there is same deep,
dark conspiracy involved in redevelopment funding. Those weak sisters whom
opponents must believe were blindfolded and arm-twisted into giving support include
the Novato city staff, the Novato Unified School District, the sanitary
district, the fire district and the police department, as well as every member
of the Mann County Board of Supervisors.
After every new Hamilton-generated city
service— every police, fire, school, park and road expense— is paid for, the
city will annually receive about $165,000 in general revenues for about 30
years while the redevelopment agency bonds are paid off. After that, the city
will receive between $2 million and $2.5 million per year. In addition, the
city’s sales-tax revenues will jump by about $500,000 a year.
Perhaps most importantly, redevelopment
agency financing will generate $32 million (non-inflated) or $92 million (inflated)
to assist on-site workers in owning or renting at Hamilton. This assistance,
mandated by the Community Redevelopment Act, along with the development and
use of the adjacent railroad lines, is a strength that wasn’t even considered
in the environmental impact report, which estimated the amount of traffic
Hamilton could generate or the number of workers who could live on site.
In one fell swoop
of about 10 years, Hamilton does more than 100 smaller projects to balance jobs
and housing, to increase Novato revenues, to encourage the first of many needed
pedestrian pockets which will promote transit use and traffic reduction, and to
increase the supply of affordable housing.
Why is it that so many of the traditional
naysayers want to push those opportunities off onto future generations where
the cost will be much higher?