A surprise new reintroduction of the Redevelopment Agency, selling the City’s Record Street Properties, and much more are on tap for Wednesday, August 14
By Alicia Barber, PhD
Among important topics facing the City of Reno this week, last Thursday City staff just posted a hugely consequential item on the agenda of the Reno Redevelopment Agency Board: It’s the proposed relaunch of the Reno Redevelopment Agency complete with new planning districts, newly defined goals, and an array of new programs and procedures through which developers and investors can apply for financial assistance using redevelopment funds.
This is a big topic, so I’ll devote a lot of space to it today, but at the end I’ll list some items to be addressed by City Council, plus updates on prior items. As always, scan the full calendar of this week’s City meetings here for what interests you.
Sweeping Changes Proposed for Redevelopment
Item B.1 on Wednesday’s Redevelopment Agency Board agenda is titled “Discussion and Adoption of the Redevelopment Agency Status Report, Participation Program, and Application Form,” but it is in fact a complete relaunch and reconfiguration of Redevelopment Agency programs after approximately 14 years of dormancy, all conceived without any public input or specific direction by the Agency Board.
The Redevelopment Agency Board, if you’re not familiar, is comprised of the members of the Reno City Council, who convene as that separate body on the same days Council meets. There are a lot of documents included with this item, and I’ll be focusing primarily on the Redevelopment Agency Status Report and Redevelopment Agency Participation Program and Processes.
These materials have clearly been in the works for months, although the documents themselves don’t reveal how they were put together—at whose request, by whom, and with what outside consultation, if any. They have just appeared, packaged, designed, fully formed, and ready for action, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.
I’ve already identified a wide array of concerns, which I’ll group into five issues:
- It was not undertaken as a public process and was conceived without any community, stakeholder, or Board engagement. In fact, the only “stakeholders” referenced are the property owners, developers, and investors who would be able to apply for Redevelopment Agency funding should these policies be adopted.
- It does not identify who the City of Reno is now considering to be “Redevelopment Agency staff,” and yet it places that entity in charge of reviewing applications for Redevelopment assistance, presenting their recommendations to the Agency Board (Council) for final approval, and more.
- It does not propose the reinstatement of the Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board (RAAB) or any citizen body to advise the Agency Board (Council) on desired projects to be prioritized or undertaken in the redevelopment areas.
- It divides RDA#2 into seven new “planning districts,” each with a new (and in some cases, questionable) name, assessment of current conditions, and delineated goals, needs, and development preferences with images of “Sample Properties.”
- It proposes that the Redevelopment Agency adopt five different “Participation Programs,” each of which is incredibly complex and warrants individual discussion in great depth and detail in order to determine whether the Board and greater community agree that these constitute desirable project types for each or any of these areas, and agree with how staff proposes to evaluate and fund them.
It’s highly surprising to me that this item isn’t being presented as an information-only presentation, or as a draft or workshop. Rather, the staff recommendation is for Council (sitting as the Agency Board) to adopt all of it, without either they (I’m presuming) or the public having been able to see any of it for more than a few days.
I am suspecting that these documents will be presented as “data-driven” (a term we have been hearing a lot from staff lately), but while they do indeed contain a great deal of data (albeit largely uncited), they are also the product of an astounding number of subjective assessments, assumptions, and decisions that should raise a lot of questions for residents, property owners, and of course our elected representatives.
The proper forum to discuss a relaunch of the Redevelopment Agency, in parallel or sequential order with the Redevelopment Agency Board’s own discussions, would have been the Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board (RAAB), but the City of Reno dissolved it approximately six years ago, in the middle of the so-called “dormancy” period for Reno Redevelopment. If that period of dormancy is now ending, then the proper course of action is to immediately reinstate the RAAB and run any new programs and policies through them, so that Advisory Board can then advise the Redevelopment Agency Board as they did for 27 years—not just pretend that the RAAB never existed, that it isn’t needed, and that no one cares about its return.
When it comes to Redevelopment in particular, you have to keep in mind that it is primarily motivated by the intent of reducing blight and increasing the economic value of property. That may, to some, seem to be a straightforward data-driven assessment based primarily on assessed property values, but any human who cares about a place knows that notions of “blight” and “value” can be quite subjective—just like the notions of the “highest and best use” of a piece of land, which when conceived solely in economic terms will almost always favor the shiny and new. And the decision of what kinds of development should receive public subsidies in specific areas of Reno should, one would hope, prioritize what the public actually wants to see there.
I’ll do what I can to explain why the components of this relaunch raise some concerns for me, taken in the same sequence that I introduced them above.
Issue #1: It was not undertaken as a public process in association with any community or Redevelopment Agency Board engagement.
Because Reno’s Redevelopment Agency has been essentially dormant since 2010, none of our sitting Councilmembers or the Mayor have sat on the Board when fully operational. That same lack of familiarity certainly extends to most City staff and a large number of local residents. Relaunching it is a big deal.
Residents might naturally be asking if the Redevelopment Agency is projected to start earning more revenue in the coming years, what expenditures of those funds should be prioritized? Paying off debt? Funding the maintenance of prior Redevelopment projects (some of which I wrote about last week)? The last formal Redevelopment Plan is clearly out of date, and doesn’t answer these questions with respect to the current status of the Agency and its funds.
Ward One Councilmember Jenny Brekhus has been calling for the City’s Redevelopment Plan to be updated for years now, and almost three years ago wrote a Substack post about Reno’s “Vampire Redevelopment Agency,” which you can find here and which I encourage everyone to read. She’s thought about this more than any sitting Councilmember, and raises a lot of excellent points and questions.
As Councilmember Brekhus states in that post, she was informed by City staff years ago that an updated Redevelopment Plan was not required to get the Agency moving again, just a current statement of goals and initiatives. That is apparently what is happening here, but the goals and initiatives are so different than what came before them that this essentially constitutes a whole new approach.
Issue #2: It does not identify who the City of Reno is now considering to be “Redevelopment Agency staff.”
This is critically important, in order to understand not just who wrote all of these documents, including descriptions of the various redevelopment areas and what types of development are most desirable there, but just as importantly, who would actually be running the Agency and evaluating all the applications for its funded programs.
Most residents may not know that the Reno Redevelopment Agency once had more than a dozen dedicated staff positions all to itself. As I wrote earlier this year in my initial post advocating reinstatement of the RAAB, the number of Reno’s Redevelopment Agency staff was gradually reduced as revenues declined. In 2008 it had 17 staff, cut to 6.5 in 2009, with the loss of the final staff members in 2011.
The current position of Revitalization Manager held by Bryan McArdle was created in 2015 specifically to assist the Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board (which I’ll discuss next) after all the rest of the staff positions had been eliminated. The RAAB had continued to meet, because of course even without revenues, there was still activity in the redevelopment areas and with redevelopment projects. Its dissolution was never explained or justified.
Redevelopment is now apparently lodged in the Economic Development section of the City Manager’s office, so who exactly is that, and what expertise do they hold? The recent budgeting process identified a number of positions working for the Revitalization Manager: an Activation Coordinator, an Economic Development Marketing Program Manager, and a Property Development Analyst (RDA). Is this the current “Redevelopment Agency Staff” or is some additional reconfiguration anticipated? Who is being considered the Redevelopment Agency Director or Administrator, positions that used to exist but were eliminated years ago?
Read the rest at The Barber Brief.
The Barber Brief is an independent e-newsletter and blog written by Dr. Alicia Barber on the Substack platform. It is reposted by This Is Reno with her permission.
