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Sunday, May 19, 2013
CADA Executive Director Paul Schmidt to Retire December 2011
by Karen Ulep, published on September 26, 2011 at 3:19 PM
Storyline: CADA Staff Changes
Paul Schmidt has announced that he will retire from his position as Executive Director of the Capitol Area Development Authority (CADA) at the end of December 2011. CADA is a Joint Powers Authority of the City of Sacramento and the State of California. By announcing his retirement plans now, Schmidt provides the CADA Board of Directors with time for a seamless transition of leadership.
Schmidt was appointed Executive Director in 2005, but his work in the Capitol Area began in December 1975 when Schmidt and Jacqueline Whitelam, CADA’s Deputy Executive Director, were staff planners for the State on the Capitol Area Plan, adopted by the Legislature in 1977. The Urban Land Institute has called the Capitol Area Plan “an experiment of national significance”. When CADA was created to implement the residential and neighborhood commercial components of the Capitol Area Plan Schmidt and the founding members of CADA first cleared blight and established an internally funded rental assistance program. Since 1978, CADA has built over 800 new dwelling units through public private partnerships and rehabilitated an additional 600 units. Twenty five percent of the units CADA manages or develops are affordable to extremely low, very low or low income residents. Today, CADA has established a model of smart growth by building mixed-use, mixed-income sustainable development adjacent to light rail stations serving the Sacramento region.
Schmidt served as CADA’s Development Director for 15 years, having been responsible for Somerset Parkside, Stanford Park Townhomes, the Capital Athletic Club, Saratoga Townhomes and numerous other downtown projects. He was also instrumental in the planning and development of the East End and R Street Projects. From 1995 to 2005, he was Director of Asset Management overseeing the acquisition and sale of properties, as well as CADA’s capital improvements and facilities maintenance programs. During his time at CADA Schmidt has been civically engaged in improving the City of Sacramento. Schmidt initiated community workshops on R Street, chaired Sacramento Heritage Inc. and served as President of the American Institute of Architects Central Valley chapter. He is also a long time member of the Board of Directors of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership and the Friends of Light Rail. Recognition of the professionalism Schmidt has evidenced throughout his career has included his being named Corporate Architect of the year in California by the AIA California Council in 2001.
Reflecting upon his time at CADA, Schmidt said, “I consider public service a vocation. I have been privileged to devote my career to making the Capitol Park Neighborhood into a wonderful place to live, work, and raise a family. It’s now time to turn the opportunities and responsibilities over to the next generation and let them realize their aspirations.
The staff and board members of CADA wish to express their gratitude and appreciation for Paul Schmidt’s commitment and the example he has set in being a neighborhood-builder and compassionate leader.
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CADA is a city/state Joint Powers Authority whose mission is to implement the residential and neighborhood commercial elements of the State’s Capitol Area Plan. CADA helps facilitate redevelopment and new developments within its boundaries as well as directly manages and maintains apartments, commercial/retail properties and parking spaces on state property.
Disclosure:
Karen Ulep is the Communications Manager for CADA.
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In any event the State if it every grows again will expand to north to the Railyards. CADA needs to sell all of this excess property.
Scuttling CADA would set back residential development in their area by a decade, since it would also scuttle the large projects that have been underway for years, many set back by the state of the economy but now getting ready to break ground (for example, there won't be a Christmas tree lot at 16th & O this year because the project on that lot breaks ground this fall.) Doing away with CADA would be a bad deal for the state, the city and the residents of the central city--especially the residents of CADA properties.
Or to ask whether the city might have a different or better use of the $2.8M of incremental tax revenue that CADA siphons away each year.
Sure, it is possible that CADA is the one redevelopment agency that spends the people's money wisely. But when politicians, labor and developers all relying on the status quo, usually we find it is the taxpayer who is getting screwed.
Your kidding right? This particular Joint Powers Authority happens to use the same exact incremental tax diversion scheme as every other redevelopment agency in California.
Note that SB1460, which set the tax increment base for the R St corridor redevelopment in 2002 says "CADA has the powers of a community redevelopment agency within a statutorily defined project area" Seems pretty clear to me.
ftp://leginfo.public.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/sen/sb_1451-1500/sb_1460_cfa_20020328_115703_sen_comm.html
I like shiny new buildings too. But what makes you so comfortable that the $2.8M / year in property tax diversion has been such a great deal for our city? Independent ROI analyses are pretty hard to come by when dealing with Redevelopment Agencies.... errrr Joint Power Authorities like CADA.
CADA isn't all about shiny new buildings: they're primarily about maintaining the existing building stock in the project area, and providing housing that is affordable to many of the people who live and work downtown. Using that metric, they're doing a pretty good job. But they have also produced new buildings too. Why don't you try comparing them to comparable areas in the central business district, and see who has produced more housing in recent decades?
As you point out, and typical redevelopment-speak, CADA's own metric of success is the number of affordable housing units. Think about that for a moment.
As a corollary, you and have both reviewed the Arena financing proposal with completely appropriate levels of skepticism. But to the credit of the Think Big team, at least they put their financing proposal on paper for the public to examine (and call BS on). Imagine if the Think Big team's measure of success was number of arena seats, with no mention whatsoever of how many dollars each seat cost, or if those seats might delivery a good return on investment to the city?
Well that is exactly what CADA is doing. Their documented measure of success is number of affordable units (and various other un-measurable mumbo-jumbo). But they make no mention whatsoever of how cost effectively they spend the $2.8M of diverted tax dollars each year.
So I would say right back at you... until any of these RDA's provide an independent ROI we should all apply healthy levels of skepticism.
I am surprised you don't have the same questions for these tax dollars that you have for arena tax dollars.
Want to evaluate their measure of success? Read their annual report:
http://www.cadanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/year_end1.pdf
This report explains what they're doing, what they have done, and what they have planned. Their annual budget (on the last page) makes clear that CADA is self-supporting--they make more money than they spend, and use the profits to reinvest in the community, to the tune of over a million dollars a year. That's exactly how TIF is supposed to work: direct community reinvestment. And while you have cast affordable housing into sharp relief, keep in mind that 25% of CADA's units are affordable housing, while the other 75% are market rate. And that 800 units of new housing mentioned by Rhys02 above is located on only 22.5 acres--nine city blocks! That's not counting the existing housing stock they have maintained and upgraded. If you extrapolated that kind of growth to the entire central city, over 600 blocks, it would work out to something like 24,000 housing units--in other words, more housing than is currently located in the entire central city!
So, it's pretty easy to demonstrate that CADA pays for itself, and also attracts development to the area. The "free-market" answer would have been to simply let the central city continue to decay, leaving those burnt-out shells to rot and the absentee landlords to let their properties fall into further disrepair. I don't consider that an acceptable answer.
The arena proposal is a catch-all attempt to steal from every available funding source in the central city to pay for *part* of the arena, and borrowing money from Goldman Sachs for the construction loan, a measure that is likely to result in the city paying the inevitable funding gap from its general fund--while the developer, Goldman Sachs, and the arena operator get paid first. Meanwhile, CADA is a little more low-profile, but they are a great example of exactly how urban development SHOULD work--instead of big grandstanding projects, they work a block at a time or a project at a time to knit the urban fabric back together.
Yeah I read it, and cited data from it in my earlier posts.
You (and CADA) claim they are "self-supporting". This is true in the sense that they actually have a balanced budget, which in the corrupt world of Redevelopment Agencies is actually quite a feat (see SHRA). Kudos to CADA for not taking on hundreds of millions of bond debt. Yeah!
With 28% of their operating budget comes from the incremental tax, CADA is "self-supporting" to same extent that someone on food-stamps and welfare is "self-supporting". Since that property tax revenue is going to CADA and not the city, it leaves the rest of Sacramento's residents left to pay for the local services like police, fire, etc. And it leaves the state picking up the tab for the local share of education funding.
The biggest issue is that $2.8M per year of our own property tax revenue is being controlled at the direction of an unelected board, and not the city whom we can hire and fire.
And I still have not seen a single document showing how effectively or competitively CADA is spending our property tax subsidy. William, I know you are a critical thinker, so I am surprised that CADA doesn't deserve scrutiny simply because they "provide low income housing" and have a fluffy year-end "report".
We all wish some shining example of free enterprise would take care of our growing downtown, but Paul and his associates are not unicorns.