City not off the hook on payment

There’s still no final word on how much the city will have to pay the state in “true-up” payments following a phone conference Tuesday with state Department of Finance officials, Senior Planner Shawn Tillman told the City Council Tuesday (Aug. 7), but it won’t be the $11.2 million originally sought—enough “to put the city in insolvency,” as Councilman Scott Gruendl said.

Under terms of a hastily drawn bill, AB 1484, the DoF came up with a flawed methodology that led the county auditor-controller to determine the successor agency (i.e., the city) owed $11.2 million to settle its redevelopment books.

The city came up with an alternative amount, $961,000, and paid it under protest, in the belief that in fact it owed nothing. The phone conference was designed to clear things up, and Tillman characterized the results as “satisfactory,” but exactly how much the state will squeeze out of the city remains “inconclusive.”