Pomona PD frisking an unhoused individual at Veterans Park ©2001 Julian Lucas
City of Pomona Circa 1950’s
Illustration Julian Lucas
The city of Pomona approved to renew its contract with the Downtown Pomona Owners Association (DPOA) for supplemental police patrolling for the downtown Pomona Business Improvement District (BID) during the June 3 council meeting.
According to the Los Angeles City Clerk, a BID is a “geographically defined area within the city in which services, activity and programs are paid for through a special assessment which is charged to all members within the district…”
The agreement will provide two police officers to continue patrolling the downtown Pomona BID on top of the private security the DPOA allocates money for. The DPOA will pay $187,288 of the police salary, while the city will pay $337,752, bringing up the total of the contract to $525,040.
The city’s budget for the new fiscal year was adjusted to accommodate for the renewal of the contract with the DPOA. A total of $10.9k was added to the budget.
Tim Sandoval, mayor of Pomona, emphasizes that the renewal wasn’t motivated by anyone on the council, but rather, the city is answering what businesses within the downtown Pomona BID have been calling for.
“It was really driven by the business owners themselves who have experienced a number of different break-ins, burglaries, broken windows,” Sandoval said. “It's been a challenge for some of them.”
The DPOA revenue consists of a tax that every business within the district pays to help promote the area, keep it clean and provide private security.
The city of Pomona created the Downtown Pomona Unit (DPU) with the DPOA back on June 22, 2022 to help the private security it hired patrol and secure the district. Between the years of 2021-2022, the DPOA spent $306,373 on security for the BID. The city recommended it allocate 49.8% of the city’s budget for the Pomona Police Department for the new fiscal year.
A volunteer of the non-profit bookstore located within the BID, Cafe Con Libros, Ralph Acosta, has seen multiple incidents where help was needed to ease the tension. Acosta describes a moment where he saw unhoused people harassing children from the local school as they were crossing the train track. However, he doesn’t think the continuing policing of the downtown area will solve the problems it faces. “I’m in pro-support of [the] community in different layers,” Acosta said. “But to me, it surpasses more than just the layer of policing. Policing itself is one layer and I don’t see that solving the problem.
Mike Ellis, the chief of police, mentioned the new money isn’t paying for training on how to deal with people going through a crisis. “We just recently trained everyone on de-escalating techniques which can include someone that’s being violent or potentially in a mental health crisis,” Ellis said. “So we have ongoing programs for these types of training that the officers [from] downtown will also participate in.”
The contract renewal comes with the option of extending it past the 2024 fiscal year and into the year 2025.
EDITORS NOTES
Over the past thirty years, business improvement districts, (BIDs), have been incredibly popular across the nation. On the other hand, not much is actually understood about how they affect communities. Anecdotal and scientific data supporting strongly held beliefs about BIDs is scant. Some claim that BIDs are a creative means for businesses and communities to unite in response to decline in public funding or known as disinvestment which caused abandonment. Some also claim they provide “safety, cleanliness and habitable for residents, and vendors”. While others attest that BIDs are a sham that uproot underprivileged people, criminalize the unwanted, and alter local culture.
”BIDs are geographically bounded areas where local property owners can assess themselves or their tenants a fee to solve problems that are negatively impacting the local business environment.”
BIDS redesign large areas of public realm in our cities [and] become a powerful voice shaping land use, zoning, transportation, and urban redevelopment planning. BIDS are incorporated as non profit organizations, which people may think being a non profit is doing good work for the board. However, we have to ask who sits on the boards of these organizations? Schaller, Sussana, Business Improvement Districts and The Contradictions of Placemaking; Georgia Press
The majority of BIDs board members are property owners. Moreover, BIDs are a taxing body that assesses properties within the BIDs boundaries. Originally used in assessing commercial properties, residential properties are being assessed more frequently in the present day. Despite the policy language's emphasis on supporting small companies and maintaining a clean and safe environment, the properties are ultimately the subject of the assessment. The assessments are then transferred to small businesses through their leases, which presents a contradiction. Small businesses are currently covering the cost of their lease and the assessment, which raises the value of the property.
On the weekend of March 26, 2024 there were multiple businesses in the downtown arts colony area that were vandalized resulting in store windows being shattered causing thousands of dollars in repair. The BID didn’t prevent this unfortunate crime from happening. In fact vandalism has happened on multiple occasions in the downtown area. So we have to ask the question, do BIDs really provide safety, is the area really secure with having two police officers present? Are the two officers only present during art walks? Why do we need police for art events?
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