Jerry Brown signs new post-redevelopment bill

Four years after approving legislation that ended the anti-blight redevelopment program in California, Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed a bill giving local agencies a way to pay for similar projects.

Assembly Bill 2, by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, authorizes local governments in economically depressed areas to use certain tax revenue for public works and affordable housing improvements and to help businesses.

Alejo said in a prepared statement that the bill signing was a “major victory for our state’s most disadvantaged communities.”

Brown also signed Senate Bill 107, which supporters said it will make it easier for agencies to retain money used for affordable housing programs, while also expanding the type of loans for which local agencies can seek reimbursement.

The bills come after a dispute between local officials and Brown over the winding down of redevelopment, a decades-old program that had been popular with local officials but criticized by Brown and others as a subsidy for developers. Redevelopment agencies ceased to exist Feb. 1, 2012.

“These important new measures enacted today will help boost economic development in some of our most disadvantaged and deserving communities,” Brown said in a prepared statement.

Brown’s office announced the bill signings before traveling to Seattle for climate talks Tuesday afternoon with several other governors and Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping.

Via: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article36193152.html

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Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article36193152.html#storylink=cpy