Recently in Heritage Square Category

After several painful hours of debate, the City Council -did- award exclusive negotiating rights for Heritage Square to Retirement Housing Foundation.

Voting in support was Bill Bogaard, Victor Gordo, Steve Madison, Margaret McAustin and Sid Tyler.

Steve Haderliein was MIA. Chris Holden left the room before the vote.

Jacque Robinson voted yes, but then left the room, came back, and changed her vote to an abstention.

So I committed to doing a quick edit of footage from Tuesday's meeting at the JRC, but my new laptop for editing video (courtesy of my pops, Reuben Ruiz) wasn't entirely tricked out with requisite tools and by 3 a.m. I still hadn't managed to upload the video to our new streaming host. So here's the Tube treatment.

Highlights: Developer Jimmy Morris leads about 10 others in rhetoric-laced chants about injustice in the Northwest, laying the blame for all of the Northwest's ills -- including this past year's violence -- on Mayor Bill Bogaard. What's next? Will the Weekly blame him for the war in Iraq? After bringing the drought, will Bogaard call a plague down upon us? Invite a totalitarian regime into the Rose Parade?

Most of the racially-charged questions-as-accusations had remarkably boring answers:

Q: What happened to Jazz in the Park?
A: It grew too big and people like former DIstrict 1 Councilwoman Joyce Streator didn't want it in Brookside Park.

Q: Why hasn't Robinson Park been improved?
A: The city's $3.3 million needs another $2 million or so for the first phase of about $19 million in planned improvements.

Q: Where's the affordable housing?
A: There are 181 units either built or under construction and the city is looking at four properties it might buy.

Q: How many African Americans have been hired under the city's local hiring program?
A: City is not allowed to track statistics by race.

Despite what drew people to attend, the meeting was about Heritage Square -- and, even more so than the project -- the meeting was about several people's interest in seeing the Bakewell Company get the job.

From the suggestion department: "No justice, no peace" is a classic, but I'd advise steering away from tongue-twisting chants like "The Mayor is Available, Just not for the Black Northwest Pasadena Community."

FYI Didn't give this the pro treatment -- video and editing quality is decidedly 'rough cut'

Reports of my demise are well founded. Laid low by some mystery malady (noninfectious) I stumbled through Monday night's meeting / reporting until 3 a.m. and struggled to recover since. Been back at my desk for an hourish now but I feel like a Chinese-made toy (full of lead).

Anyhoo, at Monday's meeting, Jimmy Morris reminded me the city would be coming back Tuesday with answers to the questions asked during the Lashing of the Mayor at Meeting II last month. I planned to go, but my virus said 'No.'

Apparently the Heritage Square kerfuffle turned into a disagreement of whose meeting it is.

Did get ahold of interesting e-mail exchange which includes a response from a pissed off City Manager Cynthia Kurtz to Fair Oaks PAC'r Ishmael Trone:

"I ask that you not rewrite history to serve your purposes at least as it relates to me personally or my carrying out my responsibilities as City Manager."
Cynthia Kurtz

Full e-mail exchange is posted in the full post below. I've taken license to reverse the order of messages to restore the chronology.

Here's the statement Mayor Bill Bogaard read at the outset of deliberations last night:

We are about to make a “new beginning” on the Heritage Square project, which was previously before the Council on April 30, May 21, July 30, and August 6. On the latter date, the Council unanimously terminated the developer selection process and requested the City Manager to offer recommendations as to how to proceed.

We now have a report from the City Manager, and I look forward to getting this project moving once again. Deliberations on Heritage Square so far have been unusually controversial, and I have friends from the community who tell me they left the Council Chamber on prior occasions with feelings of anger, futility and disrespect, and that others they know had similar feelings. I sincerely regret such feelings and want to offer a short comment.

Read more for the rest ...

When Ishmael Trone, co-chair of the Fair Oaks PAC and the former Developer Selection Committee spoke during public comment, it was in line with an e-mail distributed prior to last night's meeting (bold text as per original):

In an effort to keep the Pasadena and Altadena community aware of the politics surrounding the Heritage Square Development, please see attached flyer announcing the most important meeting thus far.

To date, the mayor has outright said the community and certain city staffers were not intelligent enough to select the RIGHT developer for the project.

Hired an Orange County investigator to create a report to validate his assertion that the process was manipulated by city staffers and community members to favor the Bakewell Company, thus creating a smear campaign upon volunteer community members and his own staff. The report cites no manipulation noted. The entire report is inconclusive as no community members were interviewed, only certain city staffers whose names were not mentioned!

Has said openly that all 5 committees were wrong in their selection.

Has met with the owner of Century Housing prior to the announcement of their departure as a partner with the Bakewell company.

Has denied the winner of the RFP process the opportunity to enter into a exclusive negotiation process.

And finally, has no concrete explanations for any of his actions, as noted by his responses at the recent Town Hall Meeting at Jackie Robinson on September 19, 2007.

THE BAKEWELL COMPANY IS SET TO INTRODUCE THEIR NEW PARTNER FOR THE HERITAGE SQUARE DEVELOPMENT.

THE CITY MANAGER IS SET TO ANNOUNCE HER RECOMMENDATION TO CONTINUE NEGOTIATIONS OR START ALL OVER.

THIS IS THE MEETING WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.

YOUR SUPPORT IS NEEDED!!!!!

Ishmael Trone,
Co-Chair: Fair Oaks PAC
Co-Chair: Heritage Square Developer Selection Committee
Director: San Gabriel Valley Black Business Association

As the council closed in on a final vote regarding separate Heritage Square measures, it was Margaret in the Middle of Chris Holden and Sid Tyler, who was not happy that affordable housing for families was being excluded entirely from the project. Queue the stream to 4:51.

Bill Bogaard: Are we close on the first four?
Sid: No we're not. I'm not close apparently with anyone else on item two. I'd prefer to take that as a separate vote.
Chris: Isn't it be possible for the clerk to reflect your dissent on item two? So call the roll on the motion and know that Councilman Tyler ....
Sid: Well I feel strongly about it, Chris, to have a separate vote on it. If somebody told me at the time we acquired these properties that there would be no affordable housing there for families I wouldn't have voted to buy those properties, and I dare say ...
Chris: It's affordable for seniors
Sid: Family is what i'm talking about
Chris: But it's a senior project
Sid: this is what weve been trying to do
Chris: We could do a lot of things, we can .. well let's put the family in your district, pick a site
Sid: I'll take it!
Chris: Let's get the trust fund money and let's build something in your distrisct, pick it out!
Sid: It's not a matter of where it is, it's a question of what we do.
Chris: Bring it forward Sid, come with a recommendation, 'Here's a site in my district I want to use that trust fund money to build as many low-income housing as I can in my district,' I'll support you 100 percent, use all the money in your district
Sid: This is a discriminatory thing we're doing to your community.
Chris: To my community? I thought we were talking about a city-wide project?
Sid: I think that's where the need is.

Soon thereafter, Sid helped refine Chris' motion to give the Fair Oaks PAC, CDC, Northwest Commission et al a say in the developer selection ... then voted against it. It wasn't the only tense moment of the evening, as Chris also shared some lower-intensity glaring with Victor Gordo and Margaret McAustin.

Ultimately, it was decided to:

1 - Endorse the revised project concept (unanimous)
2 - Agree to no affordable housing for families (6-1, Tyler dissenting)
3 - Reaffirm city will only contribute the land it paid $8.6 million for (unanimous)
4 - Instruct staff to develop a Request for Qualifications (unanimous)
5 - Solicit input from community groups in the process of selecting a developer (2-6, only Chris and Jacque Robinson supported)

A follow-up motion from Victor passed which had the effect of precluding the various commissions and committees from having a role as it moves forward.

Heritage Square is back tonight. Here's a flier circulated by the so-called Pasadena-Altadena Black Coalition, creators of the infamous lynching flier.

I'm uncertain of the "final decision" being referred to as the council voted, prior to going on its summer recess, to terminate pre-negotiations and reset the process.

Refresher from Aug. 8 meeting posted below.

No lynching flier this time, but Town Meeting II went down tonight at the Jackie Robinson center with Mayor Bill Bogaard, council member Chris Holden, Jacque Robinson and City Manager Cynthia Kurtz present. Victor Gordo stopped by briefly.

I threw an update up here, story will be in Friday's paper. Posted below as well ...

And we get accused of trading hyperbole for sales.

Pasadena Journal publisher Joe Hopkins this week blames Mayor Bill Bogaard for gang and interracial violence, awful public schools, blocking an African Sister City and fee hikes at PCC. The editorial, which exalts Pasadena as "a great city as long as all of the citizens, Black, White, Latino, Asian, and others, are included" laments the preponderance of Asians at our city college. (Guess who's to blame?)

Pasadena is a city of great things with the possibility of becoming a great city as long as all of the citizens, Black, White, Latino, Asian, and others, are included.

...

At the local Pasadena Community College there are a number of policies related to the ability to pay fees that the present Board members have implemented that has the effect of keeping Black, Brown and poor students out. There are no Blacks on that board and, therefore, few Black students at the college which has become known as "PCC, the PASADENA CHINESE COLLEGE."

The polemic is driven by the council's decision not to enter exclusive negotiations with the Bakewell Co. re: Heritage Square, which given its deep factual inaccuracies, must have occurred in the much-theorized about Bizarro Pasadena.

Forgot to mention, I did get corrected the other day re: the color of Councilman Chris Holden's suit. Although it looked uniformly white from my vantage point in the sixth-or-so row, apparently it was a summery, seersucker number faintly striped in blue and white.

G. Allan Kingston, who addressed the council in May as president of Century Housing not long before being placed on administrative leave, resigned Thursday.

Century Housing Announces Resignation of President & CEO CULVER CITY, Calif., Aug. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Century Housing, the nonprofit affordable housing lender headquartered in Culver City, announced today that its Board of Directors has accepted the resignation of G. Allan Kingston as President & CEO, effective August 31, 2007. Mr. Kingston served as the Executive Director of the Century Freeway Housing Program and led the privatization of that public agency to private nonprofit status in 1995, under continuing federal court supervision by Judge Harry Pregerson of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Century Housing remains one of the few known conversions of a California state program to a private, nonprofit corporation.

News breaks, though I hope that is only the web headline.

Pray for bandwidth if you'd like to review the Heritage Square investigation report, I'm guessing it was scanned at molecular resolution.

BTW, I couldn't tell you why the file is named "Heritage Park."

Word is the Bakewell Company had been notified by Century Housing prior to Monday night's council meeting that its financial partner was backing out, but the company broke their silence this evening:

Joint Statement Regarding Tom Scott Villages @ Heritage Square

This statement is presented jointly on behalf of The Bakewell/Century Housing Partnership (The Bakewell Company of California, LLC & Century Housing Corporation).

On January 17, 2007 the partnership known as Bakewell/Century submitted a proposal to bring a first class mixed use development to the residents of Pasadena. Hundreds if not thousands of man hours have gone into insuring that this project would not only be good for the residents of the Northwest but also good for all of Pasadena and its residents. Throughout this process we have competed honorably and earnestly and with the best of intentions.

[Follow the link below to continue reading]

See, the original plan was to surge into the newsroom and write up the outcome of the investigation into the Heritage Square development process, had verdicts been read by mid-day Friday, .

The deliberations didn't end, but I'll have much more to say about that when I am permitted to do so.

I've gotten a copy of the report now to digest and will see if I can get a PDF posted. That, or spend another day looking at even more apartments I don't want to live in.

While perusing Pasadena's archive of council meeting agendas and minutes I noticed the typical month-ish delay between a meeting and its minutes being posted had lapsed of late.

The last meeting to have minutes posted is April 23, one week before Heritage Square exploded to anoint the newly reopened council chambers with peace and harmony.

I'd hate to be tasked with authoring a record of reality that everyone on the council can agree to.

P.S. There is something mistakenly linked to for July 30 -- looks like minutes from a CDC meeting on July 31, 2006.

Yesterday seems so long ago and it's easy to move onto the next topic without realizing today's newspaper had a story about Pasadena investigating its employees handling of a development deal. ("Firm hired in Heritage Square probe")

I offer two contrasting takes posted on PUSDGreatschools today -- which more than school matters, is something of a vehicle for Pasadena's "opposition movement."

First is a video posted by local political consultant Martin Truitt, excerpted from the denouement of the April 30 council meeting and titled "Bakewell goes Berserk"

Second is a message posted by former Councilman Paul Little, who along with former Councilwoman Joyce Streator, supported Chris Holden's motion to enter into exclusive negotiating rights with The Bakewell Company/Century Housing:

That anyone was hired to “investigate” is a problem for me. Is this the result of pressure from Council or the feeling among some senior staff that Council needs to be assured of their honesty. (I sure hope it’s not the latter… if so we need a new council, not an investigation of staff.)