Fitting Demise for Katella Plan

Anaheim’s proposed $2.7-billion Katella Redevelopment Project is all but dead after angry protests from residents caused the city Planning Commission and Redevelopment Agency to back off and vote to scrap the controversial project.

The City Council is expected to kill the project officially at its session Tuesday. It should, not necessarily because the improvements aren’t needed, but because the project has been presented in a way that makes it impossible to get the broad community backing needed to make such a massive undertaking work.

The intent of the plan was to upgrade dilapidated homes, ease traffic congestion and improve the sewer system and other public facilities in the 4,400-acre redevelopment area. That, however, was not the message residents received. What they heard was that their neighborhoods were being called blighted and their homes might be condemned.

It was a fiasco in public communications that other cities ought to note and that Anaheim must take immediate steps to correct.

The redevelopment controversy holds another lesson for public officials. The quick mobilization of Anaheim homeowners, who at one meeting turned out a crowd of about 1,600 protesters, was a victory for grass-roots reaction throughout the county. And coming on the heels of a similar city setback in Huntington Beach, it should serve as a warning to all local officials that residents can, and will, react--strongly--when they believe a bad plan is being foisted on them.

What remains in Anaheim, along with the residents’ obvious anger and distrust, is the question of what to do about the improvements that the city thought were so necessary. If they truly are needed, they must be once more presented to residents, this time in a manner that will get as much public attention as before but without the fury and suspicion that the city’s clumsy approach generated.