3 Redevelopment Areas Merged

Hoping to fend off debt repayments a little longer, the Ventura City Council unanimously voted to merge its three existing redevelopment areas--and briefly raised the idea of creating a fourth one in the Avenue area.

Redevelopment is a process to help city and county governments revitalize areas that face deteriorating social, physical, environmental or economic conditions that discourage new investment.

In most cities, including Ventura, council members also serve as the governing board for the redevelopment agency, though they remain separate legal entities.

Ventura has three redevelopment areas: downtown, beachfront and Mission Plaza.

The Mission Plaza Project Area was established in 1972 and is scheduled to expire at the end of this year. The Beachfront Project Area was established in 1966 and is scheduled to expire in 2006. The most recent and largest is the Downtown Project Area, adopted in 1978 and most recently expanded in 1995. It is set to expire in 2025.

To funnel funds into redevelopment areas, the city retains slightly more than 1% of the property taxes within the boundaries of the district and channels them back into the area.

Merging the three projects will increase the debt capacity of the areas. It will also help the beachfront and mission projects, which would have been unable to repay their debt by the time their limit expired, according to a city staff report.

Now, all three areas will have until 2025 to repay their debt.

Councilman Ray Di Guilio worried the other two redevelopment areas--which have been unable to pay off their debt--might drag the downtown project down.

“In order to refinance two projects that can’t currently handle paying off their own debt, we are going to hoist them off on downtown,” he said.

He added, however, that he saw no other way to deal with it.

The merger will take four to six months to complete.