Bellflower Anti-Redevelopment Petition Drive Falls Short

A citizens’ group has failed to garner enough voter support to challenge the recent creation of a Community Redevelopment Agency in this mostly residential town.

But leaders of the small group vowed to continue their fight against the agency through the ballot box.

Officials of Citizens Against Another Redevelopment Plan, which unsuccessfully fought three pro-redevelopment initiatives approved by voters in November, said last week that they were short of the required signatures to either force the council to repeal the month-old ordinance that created the agency or call a special election in the spring.

The group launched a petition drive last month, the day after the City Council exercised its newly acquired power to create an agency. The group needed to gather 2,800 signatures--10% of Bellflower’s registered voters--by the end of last week.

The organization collected only 2,200 signatures through its mail-in petition drive, and did not bother to deliver them to City Hall, group officials said.

“We really thought the signatures were out there,” group treasurer Ruth Gilson said. “We thought for sure enough would come back (through the mail).”

Organization members mailed out blank petition forms to most households in Bellflower, asking registered voters to sign the one-page document, gather five more signatures and return the form by mail to the Gilson home.

“We’ll wait until the (redevelopment) plan is set up,” said former Mayor James Earl Christo, a Bellflower Boulevard businessman and a group member who was defeated in his 1986 City Council reelection bid. “Then we’ll take an active role in taking it to the voters again.”

Although a proposed area has been earmarked for future redevelopment projects, city officials said that a comprehensive redevelopment plan will not be completed for six to nine months.

City officials said they were relieved that the signature-gathering effort failed. They estimated that a special election would have cost the city between $20,000 and $30,000.

“People don’t understand that these elections cost a lot of money,” said Mayor Kenneth J. Cleveland, who supported the creation of a redevelopment agency in this city of 61,000 residents. “I hope (the long-running controversy over the creation of an agency) is finally over.”

The often bitter dispute over whether a redevelopment agency would benefit or hurt the city began in the early 1980s when the council first proposed a sweeping redevelopment plan that put almost one-third of the city in a redevelopment area. The current proposed plan earmarks only 605 acres of the 6-square-mile city as a redevelopment zone.

Christo was swept into city office in 1982 on an anti-redevelopment platform. The next year, he led a petition drive to force a special election. Voters in that election, apparently fearing their homes would be threatened by an agency’s land-taking power, overwhelmingly voted to prohibit the council from creating a redevelopment agency without voter approval.

But voters rescinded that restriction in November by passing three pro-redevelopment initiatives by narrow margins.

The initiatives, which restored the council’s power to create an agency without voter approval, also banned condemnation of residential property and outlined a proposed redevelopment area that includes the commercial and industrial corridors along Artesia, Bellflower and Lakewood boulevards.

Citizens Against Another Redevelopment Plan officials attributed the failure of their petition drive to the lack of signature-collecting manpower and the possibility that many residents may have considered the petition form as “junk mail” and thrown it away without studying it.

“The mail-out is never as effective as going out to markets and the street to collect signatures,” Christo said.

Residents Accept It

But Cleveland said that the drive failed because residents have now come to accept that Bellflower needs redevelopment to stay competitive with other cities for sales tax revenue.

Redevelopment agencies sponsor renewal projects in aging sections of cities by offering developers incentives, such as low-cost land, to build commercial and industrial projects.

The city benefits from increased sales tax and property tax revenue generated by the renewal projects.

“I know a lot of people who were against it (redevelopment),” Cleveland said. “Now they come up to me and ask, ‘When are you going to get moving on this?’ ”

“We were waiting for this thing (the petition drive) to pass,” Cleveland said. “Now I expect we will be moving on it in an orderly fashion and get a project under way as soon as possible.”