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Operation Rezone Roeding

by Kevin Hall
"And what of the citizens of the City of Fresno past, present and future? The
current mayor, city council and city staff do not own Roeding Park. It's not
theirs to bargain away. The park was created and given to the community for
generations to come. Hundreds of elected city officials and bureaucrats have
come and gone since the park was established in 1903. What makes the current pack
think they can cast aside this legacy? Who or what gives them the right?"
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OPERATION REZONE ROEDING
By Kevin Hall,
Chairman Save Roeding Park/NO on Z

We are on the verge of perhaps witnessing the greatest giveaway of public assets and revenue in Fresno County history. It's corporate privatization and profiteering at its starkest, political cowardice and malfeasance at its ugliest.

If more than two-thirds of people voting on Tuesday support passage of Measure Z, our unsuspecting electorate will hand over half a billion dollars to an unnamed, undefined and uncontrollable private nonprofit corporation.

Take no comfort from the word "nonprofit" because money will be made. Lots of it. Millions of dollars in profits will be taken through privately awarded construction contracts. Millions more will be skimmed off the top through interest on construction loans. And invaluable parklands featuring century-old trees will be leased out for $1 a year to be destroyed by zoo development of animal exhibits and parking lots. No dollar estimates have been made of the park's per acre value. No one at City Hall even seems to care.

It's a little bit of Halliburton right here at home. Consider the words of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who led his country into fascism, World War II and ruin: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.

" Under Measure Z, we're being asked to vote ourselves into a state of corporatism and out of democracy.

And then the voting stops. There will be no citizen-voting allowed by the zoo corporation when it unveils its Master Plan for growth and spending. No ballots will be cast when then zoo authority approves the scheme. No elected body will have to sign-off on the deal.

The corporation and the authority are the two appointed bodies that will govern the zoo. They'll have a total of 16 members between them, only one of whom will be an elected official, Fresno's mayor. (The current mayor leaves office in four years.) This closed, corporate system lusts for complete control of the public purse, into which Fresno County taxpayers would pour at least $95 million over the next decade. Another $20 million would be added through gate and concession income at the zoo. At its base would be the hand-off of publicly owned zoo assets worth somewhere between $100 million to $300 million and priceless swaths of gorgeous Roeding Park slated for destruction.

The only possible vestige of democratic rule would have been inclusion of an appeals process. Had zoo authority decisions been made appealable to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors, then at least every citizen of the county paying the tax would have had a directly elected representative to hold accountable. But corporations reject democratic rule. Workers do not vote to select their CEO. And, in this case, taxpayers will not have direct access to the rulers. There will no appeals. Elected officials will not make the final call.

And what of the citizens of the City of Fresno past, present and future? The current mayor, city council and city staff do not own Roeding Park. It's not theirs to bargain away. The park was created and given to the community for generations to come. Hundreds of elected city officials and bureaucrats have come and gone since the park was established in 1903. What makes the current pack think they can cast aside this legacy? Who or what gives them the right?

It's less than a decade since an earlier version of the Fresno City Council was entangled in the longest running FBI investigation into political corruption in modern U.S. history. Graft, corruption and sleazy politics were Fresno's hallmark. Operation Rezone was so-named for the developer representative, Jeff Roberts, who had "REZONE" as his personalized license plate. He's done his time in prison and is back in the game. He now works for Granville Homes, which has contributed $25,000 to the pro-Z effort, and they're just a small fraction of the $1.3 million-campaign's list of local and out-of-state profiteers. In the early 1990s the deal was literally done with cash in a paper bag passed beneath a table. Today it's above board through political action committees and direct campaign contributions.

But the players are the same. The stakes are higher than ever. And their motivation remains unchanged: limitless greed.

Two redevelopment zones cover Roeding Park and the adjacent lands zoned for industrial development. Two major freeways intersect less than half a mile away, perfectly located for commuter and truck "connectivity." The remaining residential neighborhood, named Parkside appropriately enough, lies immediately south of the park across Belmont Ave. It is a neighborhood of the working poor whose homes are old and small. In the eyes of the rezone-and-redevelop predators, it's "blighted." And the 1.5-square-miles of mostly abandoned industrial ground surrounding Parkside has the perimeters highly prized by redevelopers: railroad tracks to the east, freeways to the south and west, and Roeding Park on the north.

Fresno's best Monopoly players learned long ago not to limit themselves to merely everything from Mediterranean Ave. to Boardwalk. The key to success is adding new properties to the board. So besides corrupting and compromising a long line of city councilmembers and mayors, they've also managed to bully and intimidate the city's planning and development staff into subservience. This is the city that until earlier this year had not raised developer impact fees since 1992. Thirteen years of rising costs to the city and its citizens went uncompensated for by developers, and Fresno sank deeper into its hole of public debt, unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.

Everything is right on track for these same profiteers. Squeeze government, elect sycophants and rezone whatever land you want -- even the city's own Central Park. Their publicly stated long-term vision is for complete privatization of the park and establishment of retail and commercial activities where today people celebrate family reunions, weddings and old fashioned picnics.

If Measure Z passes and the noise of bulldozers ripping out Roeding Park snaps people of out of their 'Z' state of mind, will local leaders and the complicit media, most notably The Fresno Bee, consider the results of their actions impartially, or will they fall into the trap of ongoing self-justification? Will Operation Rezone Roeding be judged a crime or will the new law known as Measure Z legalize a new generation of criminal activity?

Let's hope we don't have to find out. Now is the time to vote no, to vote against the old boy Fresno political machine. Now is the time to vote FOR something called democracy, FOR the commonwealth of Roeding Park, FOR generations alive and yet to come, FOR a healthy future, FOR Fresno. Save Roeding Park.

Vote NO on Z.
http://www.saveroedingpark.com/

§Save Roeding Park, No on Z
by Kevin Hall
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