Tuesday’s TEFRA Tank

The scheme to rubber stamp a deal that would have cost the City and local agencies a million bucks a year in property tax revnue was voted down 3-2 last night.

On Sunday I shared the news of the agenda item returning to the council after being continued in June. Let me reiterate.

TEFRA stands for Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, and authorization permits a little-known statewide housing agency to issue bonds that will provide $180,000,000 for an unknown non-profit entity to buy and remodel two huge apartment complexes over by Cal State Fullerton. The projects will subsequently be restricted to low and medium income renters.

Of course the kickers were that the projects were going to be eventually removed from the property tax rolls by the County Assessor and that the 395 now-restricted units would not even count toward the 13,000 new unit quota demanded by the State of California based on numbers cooked up in their social engineering lab by SCAG – the Southern California Associations of Governments.

The whole thing was obviously being presented by a completely biased staff led by the ever-egregious Sunaya Thomas. All you had to do was pick up on the tenor of the staff report.

Well, naturally the two socialists on the council were big supporters, as predicted. It was all about subsidizing the so-called “missing middle” a comparatively new term concocted by sociologists to identify a new group of underserved (subsidized) people like teachers and nurses and Shana Charles’ pals, the impoverished Associate Professors at CSUF. Charles bemoaned the latter’s rough life in the slums and tent cities. Okay, I made that up but you get the picture.

The lack of logic from Charles – and her fellow traveler the Dodgy Doctor from Damascus, Ahmad Zahra – peddled crap so illogical I would be remiss if I didn’t share it.

Charles claimed that this plan would remove existing overcrowding in the existing apartments. She didn’t say how; presumably locked in lower rents would mean less crowding as fewer residents were needed to make the monthly nut. Huh? What would keep future tenants from from reducing whatever the cost is by jamming into apartment units? She didn’t think about the outcome of her assertion: if the crowding were lessened, where the hell would those people go? The street? Her position was that the already badly bungled could suck up the property tax loss.

“Dr.” Zahra made an even stupider claim: that these subsidized public housing projects would boost the sales taxes, the local economy and hence the city budget! What the everlasting fuck? Did this idiot want us to believe that none of the current residents in the “market rate” apartments contribute to the Fullerton economy?

Fortunately, wiser heads chimed in. Earlier, former Councilman Chris Norby showed up to lay it out to the Council. The projects will provide no property tax but demand all of the usual services, plus more; and that the so-called “preservation” of units described by staff was nonsense. But of course the tender young Marxist Elijah Manassero was there to promote government subsidized housing, possibly hoping to move out of his dad’s house someday.

Nobody bothered to ask if these complexes were already effectively affordable, and were already being used by folks who work and go shopping in the area. Staff didn’t say, another indicator of the lack of professional objectivity from our under-compensated employees.

Nick Dunlap, to his credit, demonstrated the appropriate annoyance at the nonsense, skewering the weepy idiocy presented by Zahra and Charles. He immediately moved a substitute motion to can the idea right after a motion to approve was made by Zahra and Charles. It was seconded by Jamie Valencia, and the in the vote, Mayor Fred Jung provided the deciding vote to pull the plug.

I would hope that this is the last time we’ll see this sort of thing, but the old adage “it’s never over ’till staff says it is” is always a Fullerton factor.