1989_03 The Daily Collegian March 1989

              The Daily Collegian
Wednesday. March 1. 1989
Page 11
Derleih had said then, and had turned to
Arlin Pauler, who owns a sandwich shop
on the Mall. "Let's be open. There is."
"Yeah, there is," Arlin Pauler had said
and had attempted to mediate. "There's
probably some overlap. We want the
Mall to be a great success, they want the
Mall to be a great success. It's just ihe
means to do it that's different"
There was another silence, during
which Peggy Derleih nodded her head
Finally she looked up ana said: "When
you count on someone to do something
for you and you think they are doing it
for you and you find out they're doing it
to you—" and that was all Peggy Deriedi
had said then.
(The hostility Peggy Derleih seemed to
be talking about that night stems from a
fee each business on the Mall is required
to pay to the city. This tax, the Business
Improvement Area assessment, is
included in business license renewal fees,
and all of this money—some $40,000
last year—goes to the Downtown
Association. This money, according to a
1972 ordinance, is to be used, in short,
for promoting downtown, and there is an
ongoing dispute as to whether or not the
DTA has done anything resembling that
or more accurately, $40,000 worth.
(Carl Larsen, it seems, either is or is
not receiving most of the B.I.A. money
as salary. This money Carl Larsen is said
either to be or not to be getting either
does or does not total $28,000 a year
which either is or is not nearly 80 percent
of the B.I.A. fund, money earmarked for
downtown, i.e., Fulion Mall, promo¬
tions.)
Other notables attending the February
16 meeting in the Hdton coffee shop
were: Carl Larsen of the DTA ("Hi.
Carl," Peggy Derleih had said when he
entered the room. "Fine," Carl Larsen had
said, heading for a booth); Bob Kasada
from the city of Fresno (he attends each
FMA meeting); and Larry Artenian,
wearer of multiple hats (president of the
DTA, on the board of the FMA, on the
Central Area Task Force, and an
attorney).
The meeting that night began when
Karen Humphrey showed up, and ths
meeting that night ended shortly after
Karen Humphrey left What occurred in
between, during the two hours Karen
Humphrey spoke, was another dive into
the abstract. Karen Humphrey stood in
front of a wall hanging of plastic flowers
and spoke of "debt service monies" and of
"major project areas" and of
"infrastructure expenditure." Coffee was
poured thai night, and action plans
distributed. "!t is on my agenda lo
actively work with the six members of
ihe council," Karen Humphrey said at one
point in the meeting, and, "There isn't a
lot of extra dollars anywhere," and, "I
would like to get the high-rises
downtown filled up."
There was at the meeting an emotional
moment however fleeting, when
someone in the audience brought up the
"Ugly Building's Ordinance": "As mayor,
I plan to go find the owners of the
Penny's Building and ask them when
they're going to do their share of the
Mall's restoration," Karen Humphrey had
said.
As I was leaving the coffee shop of the
a minimum of concern for their
aftershocks, nor should it have.
Poor city planning, at least in regards
to development and palsied
redevelopment because of Prop. 13
seems, during the mid-1970s and early
1980s, evident—neighborhoods and office
complexes springing up haphazardly,
demand moving ever further from
downtown, downtown in turn atrophy¬
ing—but became big news only when ihe
aftershocks returned home, when die
families living in the expensive new
homes in the expensive new neigh¬
borhoods began turning on their water
faucets and receiving trickles, when the
heads of these families pulled out of their
three-car garages and into bumper-to-
bumper traffic.
Only then, it seemed, in the late fall of
1988 and the early winter of 1989, did the
Central Area (i.e., the Central Business
Yresno itself is considered, by many on
the Mall and in its government offices
across the street, a city of oxymorons.
Fresno Hilton that night Cad Larsen
corralled me. Tomorrow when we meet
Remind me to go with the thing on
marketing our assets,'" he said.
JT resno itself is considered, by many
on the Mall and in its government offices
across the street, a city of oxymorons. A
planning division that does no planning.
A city council that does no counciling. A
mayor and a city manager that do neither.
Whether or not this rings less true today
than, say, ten years ago, is largely
irrelevant- the residue of actions taken and
of actions not taken remains on die
playing board.
Fashion Fair is residue. Woodward
Park development is residue. That these
projects are and were inevitable responses
to a post-World War II trend toward
suburban growth seem not to have quelled
suspicions that ihey were undertaken with
District, i.e., downtown) become a
serious citywide issue, which is to say it
ceased being an issue discussed solely in
city council chambers and planning
division conference rooms and began
appearing, in however lean a treatment
on the six o'clock news.
D,
'tiring January and February of 1989
one began to sense in ihe Fresno media,
particularly the television media though
increasingly in the Bee, a lowering of
expectations regarding the Fulton Mall, a
sense of insouciant delusion, and, since
these same reporters seemed incapable of
dealing with even the most menial tasks
of reporting ("Many store seem to be
nulling out" informed one newscaster in
January), a resigned hopefulness. "Good
news" was, during these months, being
reported regularly, and what look the form
of  this  good  news,  in  ihe  case  of a
Channel 24 report in late January, was
that certain stores were not abandoning
ship.
Newberrys fit this description, as did
Longs Drugs, and one began to see two-
and three-minute stories surface, stories
which often were prefaced with cryptic
segues, as in "Gottschalks may have
closed its doors but at least one store has
decided to remain"; increasingly, though,
even these shallow reminiscings, which
one assumed were standard journalistic
background, began to vanish, began to
play hard and banal and burdensome on
the ear of those reporters whose survival
seemed to depend on searching for the
silver lining in the black cloud, however
tarnished the off-camera edges were.
"Good news for the Fulton Mall," began
the sprightly Channel 24 piece in late
January, "Newberrys chooses to stay!"
In the Bee. a less didactic whitewashing
was taking place. In early 1989, the Bee
pul out a special issue on Fresno, a
collage of stories dealing with the city in
varying degrees of depth. Still one could
read stories which tended to skirt the
reality line. "Homes Built Where The
Heart Is" read one such headline in ihe
February 12 1989 issue, a story which
implied, particularly by its drophead
which read "Low-income Housing Help
by Volunteers," lhai something was
being done downtown in terms of
housing. "What really happens," Jackie
Holmes, the construction foreman for the
group called Habitat for Humanity, told
Bee reporter Donald Coleman, "is a
community gets IxulL" Volunteers
donned hammers and hard hats and, in the
two years the organization has been in���Fresno, two homes have been budt, this
fact appearing somewhere near the end of
the story, on the jump.
This is what passed for good news for
downtown Fresno in the late winter and
early spring of 1989.
J. hat the 1989 mayoral race should
have boiled down to two candidates
should come as no surprise to anyone
who has heard all eight of them speak.
One candidate periodically places his
name next to that of God. or proclaims
himself    a    rich    Republican;    another
See MALL, page 12
The area around the Fulton Mall has become a home to many of Fresno's transients.
Kurt Hegre/Daif) CoUegit