EDITOR'S NOTE: Yea, yeah...Zuma Dogg was concerned when Daily News replaced Ron Kaye with Carolina Garcia and the first story I saw was a "warm and fuzzy" front-page cover story about Richard Alaracon. But I can see that was only a minor speed bump, and DAILY NEWS delivers an article about Grand Avenue Project -- COMPLETE WITH ZUMA DOGG ATTITUDE ALREADY BUILT IN!!! [Not even a need for Zuma Dogg to add his smart-ass comments in brackets!!! Daily News already added them!!!] So from here on it...it's nothing but News...Daily News...HELLO LAzy Times!!!
From LA DAILY NEWS
Excerpts:
State leaders have plans to spend funds (from the voter approved Prop 1C) $2.85 billion bond in ways radically different than what Californians thought they were getting when they voted "yes."
Proposition 1C was one of the four infrastructure bonds that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature put on the ballot back in 2006. Its title was the "Housing and Emergency Shelter Trust Fund Act."
Here's how the Attorney General's Office described Proposition 1C on the November 2006 ballot:
"For the purpose of providing shelters for battered women and their children, clean and safe housing for low-income senior citizens; homeownership assistance for the disabled, military veterans, and working families; and repairs and accessibility improvements to apartments for families and disabled citizens ..."
But wait until you see where some of the money is now going.
Last week, the state Assembly approved a $26.4 million payment of Proposition 1C funds to help pay for the development of the 16-acre park that's part of the Grand Avenue Project.
Yes, that Grand Avenue Project - the vision of city leaders and billionaires to build monuments to themselves by bleeding the rest of the city of vital resources. The project's wealthy developers are slated to collect nearly $177 million in tax breaks and other subsidies.
The park is a key selling point of the overall project - some lovely green space to boost the values of the 2,600 condominiums and rental units, the 400,000 square feet of retail space, the 275-room hotel and the 50-story iconic tower that will neighbor it. As such, the project's developers should be covering the park's entire cost - not draining funds that voters expect to be helping the homeless.
This bait and switch, although immoral, is not, technically, illegal. Dig deeper into the language of Proposition 1C - the part very few voters actually read - and you'll see that much of the money was slated for "development," including "open space," which can include park giveaways to developers.
But none of that was mentioned in the attorney general's description, or in the ballot title, which focused on the far worthier concerns of housing and shelter, not corporate welfare.
Likewise, the ballot argument supporting Proposition 1C claimed that the bond would "provide emergency shelters for battered women, affordable homes for seniors and low-income families, and shelters with social services for homeless families with kids." It said nothing about giving tens of millions to billionaire developers and their financiers - including an investment fund controlled by the royal family of Dubai.
The voters have been had, which is bad enough. But even worse, the disadvantaged and needy have been ripped off for the sake of the powerful and well-connected.
Original Daily News articleSeveral articles by Zuma Dogg on of how F'd-up the Grand Avenue Project was from Day 1 including my LA Weakly article: Click here (See related articles (no pun intended) on right hand column.)
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