Roger Dickinson is never too old to be a council rookie for his North Sacramento | Opinion
It’s as if Father Time is joining the Sacramento City Council as its rookie.
Roger Dickinson, 74 years young, is about to be the lone member of this council with no previous experience running anything in Sacramento. He does happen to have 21 years of previous experience running all of Sacramento County as a supervisor and all of California as a state assemblyman. Now, in this new political chapter, Dickinson returns to his roots.
It looked like Dickinson’s political career was over when a termed-out state senator named Darrell Steinberg left the Capitol in 2014 and Dickinson lost in a bid to claim the seat to Dr. Richard Pan.
But a full decade later, Dickinson has roared back into public service having dominated a crowded race to lead District 2 and its neighborhoods of North Sacramento. And while he may be a newcomer to the inner workings of council agendas and city affairs, his advocacy for North Sacramento may shake up how the city approaches its most at-risk communities.
“The career path matters less when the goal is to do things that can help people,” Dickinson said in a recent interview.
With Steinberg leaving the mayorship this December after two terms, the City Council will lose the 32 years of his political experience. But the new mayor, Kevin McCarty, will bring his 20 years of leadership previously on the council and the Legislature. And with Dickinson’s arrival, the council overall is deepening its bench.
Dickinson’s return was not based on some long-planned comeback. This is entirely due to the unfortunate circumstances of who last won this seat, the embattled and indicted Sean Loloee.
Loloee ended up resigning this January after federal prosecutors charged him with a variety of unlawful employment practices in connection with his ownership of a grocery business. The case remains pending.
But it was somewhere during Loloee’s long and tortuous political demise, the federal investigation, and the nagging questions of whether he even lived in the district, that Dickinson decided that he needed to run again.
“At first I didn’t really think I would,” he said. “As things unfolded, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t willing to sit on the sidelines and watch what was a continuation of moving so distinctly in the wrong direction.”
Loloee’s implosion left the needs of North Sacramento unattended. Neighborhoods like Del Paso Heights and Strawberry Manor remain plagued by crime and disinvestment. These communities have been desperate for strong council leadership. And that, frankly, has been in short supply for too long a time.
The spry rookie has a plan to turn things around. And he is about to challenge how the city has long managed a key revenue source, property tax.
There was once a time when cities could capture all the increases in property tax revenue on pieces of land if they declared them blighted and set about redeveloping them. The financing device, known as redevelopment, was so abused by cities that then-governor Jerry Brown killed the entire program in 2011.
After that, a state assemblyman named Roger Dickinson began to advance a new way for cities to help themselves rebuild. In 2014 he coauthored legislation to allow cities to set aside some of their regular stream of property tax revenues to help build affordable housing, improve infrastructure or other basic redevelopment needs.
Sacramento has used this tool only on rare occasions when a big project is about to happen and it needs some city financial assistance to get it across the finish line. The Aggie Square health center partnership with the University of California, Davis is one example. The renaissance of the Railyards is another.
But no big project is about to happen in North Sacramento. True redevelopment, for too long, has been some cruel and distant dream.
Enter Dickinson. He is looking to create a pot of city money to help turn his district around. He plans to ask the City Council to declare every square inch of his district an official “Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District” so that property tax revenues stay in North Sacramento help rebuild the community.
This is not free money for Sacramento. Normally property taxes help the city pay for basic services like police and fire. During the seven-year tenure of City Manager Howard Chan, he has guarded property tax revenues like a hawk so that they stay in the general fund for the city’s annual needs.
The budget philosophies of Chan and Dickinson are on a collision course with one another.
Dickinson’s financing district, he concedes, would divert money from the general fund “in the short run.” But he wants to be on a brighter future for North Sacramento. Improving the community would “attract economic investment that then increases sales tax revenues and property tax revenues and other fees. Then you are getting economic growth that will benefit the general fund to a much greater extent than if you never did it at all.”
That’s a pretty revolutionary idea for Sacramento reinvestment coming from a city rookie. But Roger Dickinson, a fixture in North Sacramento life for decades, is no newcomer to the scene.
If Dickinson ends up changing a thing or two in City Hall in the coming years, it undoubtedly will be all for the better. This 70-something has some very new and fresh ideas. North Sacramento surely needs them.