By Dr. Alicia Barber

Early voting has already started, so if you need more information about the Reno City Council races, consult my 2024 Reno City Council General Election Guide for links to candidate websites, interviews, op-eds, campaign contribution records, and more.

You can view the full list of this week’s public City meetings here. The final Reno City Council and Reno Redevelopment Agency Board meetings before Election Day will be held this coming Wednesday, October 23. 

Today’s Brief focuses primarily on my concerns about items on Wednesday’s Redevelopment Agency Board agenda and the operations of Reno’s Redevelopment Agency in general. After that, I’ll highlight the return of the Stevenson Street abandonment request, scheduled for consideration by City Council the same day.

Rushing the Redevelopment Agency Board

I want to draw everyone’s attention to City Council’s role as the Reno Redevelopment Agency Board today because I feel very uneasy about how City staff is recommending that the Board proceed this week—and indeed, how they’re proposing Redevelopment should work in Reno from this point forward.

You can find the Redevelopment Agency Board agenda here. It contains three department items:

• Item C.1 relates to hiring a contractor for asbestos abatement in the old Police Department building. 
• Item C.2 proposes to substantially revise the bylaws for the Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board (RAAB), including completely changing its composition by adding qualifications for membership.
• Item C. 3 is already asking the Board to consider directing staff to proceed with negotiations with the developers of the Grand Sierra Resort as a “Catalyst Project” using a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) deal structure. Their general application is included, in four attachments that everyone should read.

Items C.2 and C.3 specifically make me very uneasy because I do not think the members of City Council, sitting in their role as the Redevelopment Agency Board, have yet been given what they need to make informed decisions about either one.

I raised a number of my concerns back in August with my post, “Not So Fast, Please: More Time Required to Relaunch Reno Redevelopment.” Councilmembers Brekhus, Duerr, and Ebert echoed some of them and raised others in the August 14 meeting, as you can see when you read through that meeting’s posted Minutes.

Decisions about the operation of Reno’s Redevelopment Agency isn’t the kind of topic that generates a lot of public comment or public participation, not only because Reno’s Redevelopment Agency has been largely inactive, but because its operations don’t have an immediate impact that’s easy for most residents to assess. 

For that reason, I frankly expected to see the relaunch of the Agency after such a long period of dormancy handled much differently by City staff when they brought their whole “redevelopment relaunch plan” to to the members of the Agency Board (City Council) in August. I thought at that time that they would structure the discussion in a way that would fully explain the Agency’s past operations, actions, and continued obligations, and offer options to the Board for how they might proceed. It would have been best conceived as a workshop, allowing unlimited questions and discussion.

That’s not what happened. Instead, staff presented the Agency Board with a completed set of documents that they recommended the Board approve, and their self-imposed time limits allowed minimal discussion. Due to their concerns about the substance and sequence of what they were being presented, duly-elected Councilmembers Meghan Ebert, Naomi Duerr, and Jenny Brekhus voted against adopting the “Participation Programs” introduced by staff at that time—specifically because they did not believe that staff was presenting them with the information necessary to evaluate how the Redevelopment Agency had worked (or not) in the past, and how it could work in the future. 

Just think about that: Three out of seven members of the Redevelopment Agency Board (our current City Council) were not comfortable with moving forward with staff’s recommended documents, citing valid concerns about what they thought needed to come first or be structured differently. And yet Councilmembers Devon Reese and appointed Councilmembers Kathleen Taylor and Miguel Martinez, as well as Mayor Schieve, voted to adopt those materials and procedures anyway, apparently unconcerned that they did not have the support of more than 40% of their body.

Even worse, the concerns that Councilmembers Brekhus, Ebert, and Duerr raised have still not been addressed. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that the Redevelopment Agency Board not move forward with any additional decisions until those questions and concerns about the basic operation of the Redevelopment Agency have been addressed to the satisfaction of the entire body—not when we’re talking about how to structure an entity that will eventually be responsible for distributing revenues upwards of $400 million, according to the City’s own estimates—and potentially dictate how key components of our city’s landscape are shaped.

I’ll just dive right in with my continued concerns and questions. And if you find yourself harboring some of the same questions and concerns, I hope you will let City Council (in their role as the Redevelopment Agency Board) know via your comments, emails, phone calls, or whatever way you would like to contact them.

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.