Public beware! Subsidies for Petrovich/Corkill will come in many forms

Note: The City of Woodland Planning Commission will be entertained on Thursday by redevelopment (RDA) manager Cynthia Shallit who will present the newest schemes to flippantly spend more than $6 million in RDA funds by July. This masquerade has relevance to the suspended downtown multiplex RFP process in many forms. Public beware! In addition to the direct subsidies for relocating the Hoblit dealership and site improvements for Third and Main ($1 million total), subsidies for the Petrovich/Corkill Cinema West project will come as a $2 million subsidy for the Woodland Opera House children's theater - ignoring the voters advisory to spend Measure E money on this project - and as a $600,000 subsidy for the Farmers Market at Freeman Park that will include parking (a half block from the Cinema West project).

Here are excerpts from the Yolo Sun article "Friends of State Theatre group fractures apart - New advocacy forms: Woodland Civic Alliance - City hall may violate DSP to favor Petrovich" that partially illustrate the deceptive web the city has spun:

Formed in early 2010 to promote the original DSP goal of expanding and restoring the emasculated, dilapidated and (then, soon to be) shuttered State Theatre, constructed during the Great Depression (1937), FoST timely galvanized around a community campaign involving the Woodland Redevelopment Agency (WRA), hoping to realize such a cineplex project through municipal approval of an expansion and renovation plan by local developer Ron Caceres, associated with operator Galaxy Theaters.

The corner parcel which is the site of the Chase Bank project (using only 13% of this lot for its building), is the location indicated within the DSP for its original vision of State Theatre expansion, being thus depicted within Caceres’ proposal, the mission around which FoST was organized.

On May 5, 2010, WRA authorized an RFP: “to solicit a developer for a downtown theater project,” and this process ensued between Petrovich’s and Caceres’ proposals until an October 25 letter from Petrovich withdrew his proposal from the RFP process; because, in his words: “The issue has become too contentious and I do not wish to put the City Council in a position of having to choose between the more viable project [his, of course], versus the one that has created so much emotion at the State Theater site.”

Read more excerpts at WoodlandRecord.com.

Read the entire article at YoloSun.wordpress.com.