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 by Elvis
8 years 4 months ago
 Total posts:   38381  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

http://www.dailybreeze.com/government-a ... 10-million

Carson learns it has overspent by nearly $10 million

By Sandy Mazza, Daily Breeze

POSTED: 10/31/15, 5:26 PM PDT | UPDATED: 1 DAY AGO 20 COMMENTS

Carson overspent by $6.7 million last year and is nearly $3 million in the hole this year, say city officials preparing an annual budget that’s more than four months late.

Even with a partial hiring freeze at City Hall, reduced employee pension costs and elimination of many city-sponsored special events and cultural arts programs, Carson will bring in $455,000 less than the $71.6 million it plans to spend from its general fund in the 2015-16 fiscal year, interim City Manager Ken Farfsing said.

“I’m sorry to have to report this to you,” Farfsing told council members during a special Tuesday meeting. “But the budget is our most important document and it’s in really bad shape. It’s kind of a mess.”

The city’s large deficit came as a surprise to council members, who are now debating how to maintain as much funding on cultural arts programs and events as possible before a final budget vote at the Nov. 17 meeting.

“We will have to cut some of the community funding, at least $75,000,” Mayor Albert Robles said. “We’re looking at other ways and exploring our options. The city is in the best hands with Ken Farfsing. I and the entire City Council are 100 percent confident in Ken’s ability to get us through this.”

Farfsing said the city has a structural deficit of about $3 million that must be balanced before the city further erodes its reserve savings account. Already, a savings fund that was about $36 million last year is now down to $27.9 million because of overspending last year.

“The city’s current rate of spending is unsustainable and, if not corrected, will reduce our reserve funds below prudent levels,” Farfsing said, blaming past poor financial planning for the budgetary problems.

Most city budgets in the past 15 years have been lopsided, with expenditures outpacing revenue, Farfsing said. “I’ve tried to understand why the city would adopt deficit budgets, and assumed that past councils weren’t aware of the magnitude of the deficits,” he said.

Council members, he said, only saw portions of past budgets, giving them “imperfect information and a lack of recognition of the size of our structural deficits.”

The biggest problem with developing spending plans in Carson, Farfsing said, is that the city’s 1980s-era accounting software doesn’t allow officials to keep close track of constantly changing funds. Council members on Tuesday supported Farfsing’s request to buy modern accounting software to make the budget more accessible and transparent to city leaders.

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Farfsing was hired in July after the City Council fired three previous city managers in two years during a tumultuous period of intense political meddling in city business.

His tenure so far has been dominated by concerns with City Clerk Jim Dear, the former mayor who has repeatedly struggled with Farfsing for power in City Hall. Dear was heavily involved in orchestrating the hiring and firing of key city staff that led to a mass exodus of long-time leaders in recent years, according to an independent investigation ordered by Farfsing in August.

Dear was censured in a unanimous City Council vote on Oct. 20 for making “hostile, antagonistic” demands on staff to do favors for him.

Robles said the city has suffered from political dysfunction in recent years that its leaders are now, with the help of Farfsing, trying to correct.

There was a “culture of promoting friends and political allies, and putting competence as a secondary consideration,” Robles said.

At Tuesday’s special council meeting, residents pleaded to maintain the many dance, art and music programs subsidized by the city.

“I’ve been in the Mariachi Academy of Carson for about five years, and I’m one of the oldest guitar students,” said Chloe Mena, a 17-year-old California Academy of Mathematics and Science student. “I would like to ask you to continue funding the cultural arts.”

Chanel Johnson, a teacher for the after-school Sophisticated Dance program, said the popular classes have grown to about two dozen a week that serve about 1,700 children.

“Because of the grant funding we received last year, we were able to provide ... job training, scholarships, classes and students,” Johnson said. “Students were exposed to world-class artists. We hope you find it in your hearts and budget to support us.”

Once the council balances the budget, members will focus on the priority for next year’s budget, which is asking voters to approve an extension of Carson’s utility-users tax.

On Tuesday, the City Council will vote whether to include a ballot measure in the next election to continue the UUT that is set to expire next year. The 2 percent tax was imposed on electric and gas usage in 2009 but voters rejected a ballot measure in March that sought to expand it to additional utilities.

Council members already have said they hope to continue the 2 percent tax on gas and electric use without any increase to residents. The fees brought in $8.6 million last year, city officials said. Without those funds, severe cuts will be needed in 2016.

“The utility-users’ tax is absolutely critical,” Robles said. “If it’s not approved, that $3 million structural deficit becomes over $11 million. Then we will have major problems.”

 by Elvis
8 years 4 months ago
 Total posts:   38381  
 Joined:  Mar 28 2015
United States of America   Los Angeles
Administrator

BTW, here's a pretty nice histroy of the site from an article that came out in August:

http://blogs.dailybreeze.com/history/20 ... acant-lot/

Tracing the history of a very important South Bay vacant lot

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Sam Gnerre

Major media attention recently has focused on a roughly 180-acre piece of land in Carson as a potential site for a new NFL stadium.

The plot of land bounded by Del Amo Boulevard, Main Street – its address is 20400 S. Main – and the 405 Freeway has had only one development on it before: a privately owned waste dump. And that only was open for six years. So this whole post is pretty much all about a vacant lot.

Before that, it was swampland prone to flooding during the rainy season, which made it impossible for it to be used for any kind of residential or commercial building projects.

In 1949, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors banned the burning of trash in the county, giving rise to the need for public landfills where trash could be deposited.

The need for landfills made the Carson site a natural choice for landfill operator Ben Kazarian, whose Cal Compact Inc. company was able to buy the large site cheaply, since it had little value to be used for any other purpose.

The Cal Compact facility opened for business in 1959 and closed in 1965.

The eventual completion of the Dominguez Channel and related drainage improvements by the early 1970s greatly reduced the area’s flooding problems. The land had become usable again, but there was one big problem: the presence of toxic waste in the former Cal Compact dump.

During its six years of operation, the Cal Compact site had accepted not just household wastes, but also industrial waste from refineries. This included oil drilling muds, waste paint, oil sludge and various solvents.

The regulations concerning disposal of these types of industrial wastes were much looser during the years of Cal Compact’s operation than they are today, making chemical dumping much easier. The presence of these potentially harmful pollutants that were deposited during those six years would continue to plague prospective developers of the site for decades.

There was little activity on the land during the 1970s as developers looked elsewhere to build on less-tainted sites, including the Carson Mall (now South Bay Pavilion), which opened directly across the 405 Freeway from the site in 1973.

By 1980, ownership of the property had fallen into the hands of Orange County fireworks magnate W. Patrick Moriarty. Using the corporate name Casa Del Amo Estates, he planned first to build a mobile home park on the site, then decided on a business park development to be called the Carson Business and Industrial Center.

Before building could begin, though, the state of California had to inspect all former dump sites to be sure they were safe for development under the terms of a hazardous waste law the state had put into effect in 1981.

The Carson City Council supported Moriarty’s plans, but the state was slow to conduct the inspections. Its study wasn’t completed until 1984, and it revealed that the site had an estimated 250,000 cubic yards of hazardous materials.

While the project was stalled, Moriarty got himself into trouble for influence-peddling and payoffs in Carson, among other violations.

Moriarty was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 1985 on a variety of political corruption charges.

Ownership of the land itself had passed in 1983 to another Orange County developer with a past, Robert Ferrante. We came across Ferrante recently in the blog due to his involvement in the Brookside development in Redondo Beach, and promise (for the second time) to tell his story in an upcoming blog post.

Ferrante reportedly sold the land to another developer, Ranbir S. Sahni, in 1985, and from there, its ownership becomes increasingly convoluted.

During all this, little was happening on the fenced-off site itself, which had become a popular, but illegal, haven for dirt bikers and racers. They called it “Jack Rabbit Field.” Three Carson mobile home parks nearby complained about the activities, which included the occasional stray bullet from rabbit hunters, and police regularly issued tickets to the trespassers.

In 1987, Los Angeles Raiders owner Al Davis, unhappy with his lease deal with the Los Angeles Coliseum, held informal talks with Carson about possibly building a new stadium on the site, though some suspected he was using the threat to move to Carson merely as leverage against his downtown landlord.

The Los Angeles Rams also had talked to Carson about the site in 1978, but the talks died out and the team decided to move to Anaheim Stadium in 1980.

The Raiders plan was dead by 1988. The city began working in earnest again on plans to rehabilitate the site, voting to allow construction work on roads and other improvements in hopes of attracting developers.

The site’s then-owner, World Industrial Center LLC, got little help from the nine oil companies who had dumped their waste, legally at the time, at the Cal Compact site during the years it was open. All of them balked at participating in the cleanup when contacted by the state toxics agency.

Dirt was trucked in for the road improvements, and interest in the site grew, including feelers from a partnership headed by Ferrante, who by 1989 had acquired World Industrial. But still no concrete plans had come to the table.

That changed in 1991, when a new plan to build a giant retail outlet mall surfaced. The proposed L.A. MetroMall at Carson would have almost 200 shops, including an Oshman’s sporting goods center complete with athletic facilities for testing its wares, as well as other outlets including Macys, Saks Fifth Avenue, Burlington Coat Factory and Marshall’s.

The project’s developer was LA MetroMall LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Glaziers Union pension fund.

The plan still faced obstacles due to the ground contamination. Underground methane gas from the former dump would need to be extracted, and the developer planned to a clay cap over the landfill site, and cover the entire site with an additional 20 feet of fill dirt.

Ground was officially broken for the project in October 1995, though fine points of the development still were being worked on. In December, LA MetroMall agreed with the state to pay $26 million in cleanup costs.

Red tape, delays and a spate of complicated lawsuits kept the project in limbo. In 1997, the Ohio-based company Glimcher Realty Trust entered the picture, negotiating to take over the now-troubled LA MetroMall project.

In December 1997, another name surfaced in connection with LA MetroMall: former Disney power broker Michael Ovitz. After leaving Disney in January 1997, he entered into talks with Glimcher about developing an entertainment component at the proposed mall.

In March 1998, the nature of that entertainment became clear: Ovitz was leading a group planning to build, wait for it, a new NFL stadium on the MetroMall site. It would seat 75,000 fans, and be completed in time for the 2002 season.

Excitement ran high for the project, since both the Rams and the Raiders had left Los Angeles after their 1994 seasons concluded, leaving the metropolis without an NFL franchise. The City of Carson signed on, approving the project in October 1998.

Ovitz’s overall plan was called Hacienda Los Angeles, and would include an entertainment complex as well as the stadium, hosting concerts as well as sporting events.

The initial buzz began to slow in 1999 when it became apparent that the NFL was not as enthusiastic about the Carson site as Ovitz initially had been. It died when Ovitz jumped to the team planning to revamp the L.A. Coliseum as an NFL stadium.

The plan was completely moribund by 2000, when the city began talking outlet mall again with Glimcher Realty Trust. The new plan called for a retail mall, restaurants, a food court and a 20-screen cineplex. Carson approved it in November, but Glimcher didn’t follow through.

In 2002, GMS Realty of Carlsbad took its shot, entering into the plans to develop a shopping center on the site.

Ovitz then re-entered the picture in 2003, entering into negotiations with GMS to again develop an NFL stadium there. At the time, the NFL was considering the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum as possible sites, in addition to Carson.

In 2004, the heat from that latest NFL bid had died down somewhat when yet another Orange County developer entered the picture to attempt to push through a commercial development. Jerry Hopkins, owner of Hopkins Real Estate Group in Irvine, formulated a plan he called Carson Marketplace, a mixed-use development with a 200-room hotel, movie theaters and restaurants.

Hopes for an NFL stadium continued to bubble quietly, but they burst in May 2005, when the city officially removed its plan from consideration after it became apparent that the NFL wasn’t biting.

On June 7, 2005, Carson agreed to the Hopkins development plan for Carson Marketplace, despite the loss of the stadium component. Building for the massive development was scheduled to begin in 2008.

But first, the still-empty-after-all-these-years land had to be cleaned up. Carson agreed to Hopkins’ cleanup plans in February 2006, and approved the development plan in its entirety one month later.

The developers, which by now also included LNR Property Corp. in addition to Hopkins, changed the name of the plan to the Avalon at South Bay in Carson, but had to change it again after a threatened lawsuit to the Boulevards at South Bay.

The 2008 deadline was pushed back to 2010 as cleanup efforts at the site were moving much more slowly than had been anticipated.

In 2011, Mayor Jim Dear caused a stir when he pushed through a vote allowing one of the streets in the planned development to be called “Jim Dear Boulevard.” Signs went up in 2013, but were removed in July 2015 after the current Carson City Council rescinded Dear’s action. On Aug. 28, 2015, Carson officials officially renamed the street Stadium Way, even though it has not been completed yet.

Robert Rand of the Beverly Hills firm Rand Resources LLC continued to keep low-key hopes alive for an NFL stadium on the site , issuing a plan to the NFL that Carson agreed to endorse in September 2012.

But not much was expected from the plan at the time, since the AEG plan for Farmers Field adjacent to the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles seemed to have the inside track with the NFL. Another plan put forth by developer Ed Roski for a stadium in the City of Industry also was on the table.

Enthusiasm for those plans gradually waned, and in February 2015, the NFL excitement returned to the South Bay with news that a group had formed to bring either the Oakland Raiders or the San Diego Chargers, or both, to a new stadium complex to be built on the Carson site.

A similar plan is in motion to bring the St. Louis Rams back to Los Angeles on the former site of the Hollywood Park racetrack, now owned by Rams owner Stan Kroenke.

Any franchise moves must receive a “yes” vote from 24 of the NFL’s 32 owners. Votes on the Carson and Inglewood plans are not expected to come from the NFL until early in 2016. In the meantime, I’m still writing about an empty piece of dirt.

 by bubbaramfan
8 years 4 months ago
 Total posts:   1117  
 Joined:  Apr 30 2015
United States of America   Carson Landfill
Pro Bowl

Good article, but has some of its "facts" wrong. The site was a landfill way before 1959. Sometime in the 30's. More than a few companies ran it besides Cal Compact. All those proposed projects were abandoned for the same reason. The cost and time of cleaning up the site to EPA and Calif. State Board of Health standards. ( I was one of those troublemakers riding those noisey dirt bikes and shooting those at those mangy jack rabbits. I never hit one)

Come to Carson! Great panoramic views! Fresh air! Stable economy! Outstanding leadership! Certainly never a dull moment!

 by Hacksaw
8 years 4 months ago
 Total posts:   24523  
 Joined:  Apr 15 2015
United States of America   AT THE BEACH
Moderator

$10MM overspent. Damn bubba, there goes the new pavement, school upgrades, police and other emergency services in Carson. But let's build a football stadium.

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5 posts Mar 28 2024