Greetings year 2002

Well here I am again. Mexico was a four day break from the normal. The weather was ideal the food was excellent and the friends were fabulous.

My life is not much of a luxury. A luxury is being able to sit down comfortably with a good book or two. The flight there and back with the daily afternoon siestas afforded good times to read. I very much enjoyed a National Bestseller "Brunelleschi's Dome" by Ross King. More about this book later. My recommendations are that all architects, engineers and planners read this book to fully appreciate the meaning of urban design.

Cure the Sales Tax Addicts

Give most cities or counties in California the choice of having a housing development, a business park, an auto mall or a Wal-Mart and they'll pick the auto mall or the Wal-Mart every time. Never mind that the latter two eat up a lot of land, are ugly and cause traffic congestion. Forget that the business park would bring in higher-salaried workers. Or that a nice new residential neighborhood would add stability to the community.

It's all about the sales tax. Cities and counties get back one cent in sales tax revenue for every dollar spent within their borders. They love auto malls and "big box" stores because they generate a lot of revenue.

Proposition 13, passed 23 years ago, slashed the property tax that local government had depended on to pay for police and fire protection, sidewalks, street lights and other municipal services. Nowadays, housing tracts are a drag for local government. Most of the property tax goes to the state, and the locality is still stuck with financing the usual residential services. It's the same for business parks, because the employees' state income tax goes to Sacramento. Sterile auto malls and traffic-clogging big boxes are a public planner's nightmare, but local governments love them.

Typically, growing suburban areas offer all sorts of incentives to lure high-sales-tax retailers, leaving behind abandoned malls and failing retail centers on Main Street. Neighboring jurisdictions often suffer from increased traffic generated by the new businesses but get none of the tax benefits.

"There is an endless chase for the sales tax," says Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). The first modest step toward a solution is before the state Legislature now in the form of AB 680 by Steinberg, a former Sacramento City Council member.

Steinberg's bill provides that beginning in 2003, cities, towns and counties in a six-county region surrounding Sacramento allocate local sales tax revenues in new ways. The change would apply only to growth in the 1% local sales tax. The first third would be distributed as now, on the basis of sales within the city or county. Another third would be distributed by population in the six counties and their cities. The final third would reward towns and counties that meet certain goals for construction of affordable housing, caring for the homeless and sensible land-use planning.

Opponents, including the League of California Cities, are certain to attack the bill. But here are the choices: The cities and counties can begin working with the Legislature to fix the state-local fiscal mess. Or fed-up environmental and good-government groups will sponsor a ballot initiative to fix it without giving local officials a voice.

LA Times Editorial December 27 2001

Video Security for Canal That Farmers Fought to Use

A security fence and motion detectors are taking the place of federal police guarding the Klamath Falls, Ore., irrigation system.

Kern (County) on road to trouble, planners say

A model of Bakersfield traffic in 2020, part of an update of the metropolitan general plan, paints a dark picture of what will happen in the next 18 years.

Metro Push Would Put GPS on Its 1,400 Buses

A $4 million project to install global positioning technology on buses to improve puntuality and safey will be the first of its kind. Dec 26 -- Washington Post

WHY AMTRAK DOESN'T DESERVE AID ANYMORE

Joseph Vranich, a self-confessed champion of passenger trains, is against government funding for Amtrak. Dec 24 -- Washington Post

Dying malls now being redeveloped as neighborhoods

CALIFORNIA MALLS BEING RECYCLED AS HOMES From San Jose to Los Angeles, California's dying malls are being repurposed as mixed use livng spaces. Dec 24 -- Houston Chronicle

Centrifugal Cities

DOWNTOWN Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 By Robert M. Fogelson Yale University Press. 474 pp. $35

Turnstiles at US theme parks spun less often this year

Most of North America's largest theme and amusement parks experienced drops in attendance this year, a phenomenon the trade publication Amusement Business attributes to concerns about air travel after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the slowing economy. But smaller regional parks held their own or had increases in attendance, benefiting from their accessibility by car. Amusement Business's list of the 10 most popular theme and amusement parks with the expected change in visitor numbers compared with the previous year:

1. The Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, Fla. -4%

2. Disneyland -11%

3. Epcot at Walt Disney World -15%

4. Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World -6%

5. Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World -7%

6. Universal Studios at Orlando -10%

7. Islands of Adventure at Universal Orlando -8%

8. SeaWorld Orlando -2%

9. Disney's California Adventure, Anaheim, Calif. (first year)

10. Universal Studios Hollywood -9%

- Associated Press Business & Finance

"CHUNNEL" & IMMIGRATION

Rail traffic through the Channel Tunnel resumed after hundreds of refugees broke through security barricades on Christmas and tried to cross illegally from France into Britain in search of jobs and permanent residency status. Police fired tear gas to disperse them, injuring at least one and arresting 128 others, many of them Afghans and Kurds. Such attempts are common, but usually only by a few people at a time. Above, helmeted police herd some of the refugees away from the tunnel entrance in Coquelles, France.