It isn't easy for city officials to make friends when they're throwing around terms like "blight," "eminent domain" and "redevelopment."
Nonetheless, Holladay is trying.
The Holladay City Council, acting as a redevelopment agency board, held a four-hour public hearing this past week about a proposed 59-acre project in its city center. As if that wasn't enough, the council members were jeered, mocked and threatened over their jobs for trying to explain that Holladay cannot use eminent domain for a redevelopment project and that "blight" does not necessarily translate to "crack house."
"Why don't you get up one at a time and tell us how many of your constituents called you, wrote you and begged you to redevelop all of Holladay to configure something that we don't have right now?" said George Schmidt, who lives near the proposed RDA. "Then tell us what day that your terms end so we can make plans of our own."
Steve Peterson, a City Council member who conducted the hearing, felt particularly beleaguered. "It was not a campaign night for me," he said. "That was a totally different meeting than I anticipated. They saw (the RDA) as an affront to their life-long earnings as opposed to a help to them."
The proposed project covers a major business district at the intersection of 2300 East, Murray-Holladay Road and Holladay Boulevard. The area has a mix of old and new shops, some with bright marquees and lively businesses and others with dark windows and weed-filled sidewalks. An RDA project typically uses blight designations to begin redevelopment on property in a certain area.
Sometimes a city uses eminent domain to acquire the blighted property, but most often eminent domain is too politically unpopular for City Council members to use and expect to keep their positions. The project uses increased tax funds from the redeveloped area for utilities, roads or other improvements near the project.
Judging from the 200-plus crowd at Wednesday's hearing, it's an important topic for the residents and business owners who overflowed the gym of the former Holladay Elementary. But judging from the comments, not many of the meeting participants understood what the city can, cannot, will and will not do during the project, if it is approved.
"Even after I explained things, they still held onto their misperceptions, it seemed to me," said Randy Feil, an attorney for the RDA board who clarified RDA rules many times during the hearing. "It seemed that several people thought the whole process was going to allow people to destroy businesses and take property without their permission. With the law the way it is written, it's not even a possibility at this point, and even when it was a possibility, that power was very, very rarely used."
Feil and Peterson reiterated to a distrusting audience that a 2005 law prohibits cities from using eminent domain for redevelopment projects. The Legislature placed a one-year moratorium on RDAs with the same law that prohibited using eminent domain, but Holladay squeaked its RDA organization in before the spring deadline. A Supreme Court decision last week about eminent domain will not affect this situation because the high court gave states the right to regulate redevelopment as they choose.
The Utah law required that a blight study be completed by July 1, so at the end of Wednesday's hearing, the council passed a resolution that accepted the blight study, a formal acknowledgment that it had met the deadline.
But that blight study, commissioned by the city and completed by Robert Springmeyer, alarmed owners of property in the proposed RDA. Springmeyer found examples of blight, such as poor sidewalks, bad curbs, unenclosed Dumpsters, inadequate landscaping, deteriorated parking lots and buildings that don't meet seismic code, in enough of the properties to declare the area blighted — and to anger audience members.
Blight, although it is a technical term, means many things to different people, Peterson said.
"It's not a positive word," he said. "People have their own preconceived notions of what it is. It was pretty obvious they weren't listening."
Ordinarily, an area must be declared blighted before an agency can use eminent domain to acquire and then redevelop the property. However, with the Utah law that prohibits eminent domain for RDAs, it is unclear why a blight designation is necessary.
"Now with no eminent domain, you kind of wonder why we have to find blight any more," Feil said. But, "the statute was not modified in that regard," meaning that the Legislature took away eminent domain without removing the requirement for a blight study.
Holladay will hold another public hearing to discuss Springmeyer's blight report on July 21 at 7 p.m.
E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com