Anaheim's Freedom Revolution Archives

Pringle also said he finds little value in proposals to impose "build out" requirements on new entrants to his city's market in order to provide service in certain areas. He said the most difficult neighborhoods to reach in his jurisdiction, many of which have poor cellular phone service, are the wealthiest ones.

Pringle's comments were embraced by George Mason University Professor Thomas Hazlett, who said that franchising is a "dirty word" and a "needlessly anticompetitive" concept.

According to Hazlett, a lack of government regulation has done little to slow the proliferation of high-speed Internet service throughout the United States. He said the exact same approach should be taken with the deployment of Internet-based television services.

Michael Sullivan, an aide to Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he is optimistic that a House measure to establish a nationwide franchising process will be passed Friday. He said he is confident that Senate lawmakers will be able to push their proposal to address the issue "across the goal line" before the end of the session.

The passage of a series of statewide franchising measures in states such as Indiana and Texas has given the issue more momentum at the federal level, Sullivan said. But he said many local governments remain reluctant to concede their authority on the franchising issue.

"It gets construed as a Bell issue," he said of the dominant phone firms wanting streamlined video franchises. "This is not a Bell issue."

Hazlett said consumers would benefit immensely if more local officials approached the issue from Pringle's perspective. "That's one down, 33,000 to go," Hazlett said.

We decided to try something different in Anaheim – something radical in the context of the conventional wisdom of economic development for cities. We decided to remove government as the central planner and driver of progress, and instead place our trust in the decisions of free people acting within a free market. The City of Anaheim role is restricted to fostering an environment of economic liberty: liberalizing zoning laws to give property owners maximum freedom to use their property as they deem fit; cutting business taxes and regulation and rewarding citizens for taking the initiative in revamping their homes and neighborhoods.

The results speak for themselves. While local governments across the state still wrangle with redevelopment projects they were contemplating when Anaheim embarked on the path of reform, our Platinum Triangle project – the area around Angel Stadium of Anaheim - has rapidly leapt from drawing board to reality. In a few short years, an area previously composed of warehouses and industrial uses is being transformed into a vibrant downtown of up to 9,500 residential units, 5 million square feet of office space and over 2 million square feet of commercial uses – and at a speed only the free market can achieve. What’s more, this has all been accomplished without redevelopment, without eminent domain, and without city planners micro-managing every development project.

Platinum is only one manifestation of Anaheim’s freedom revolution. Thanks to the leadership of my friend and former council colleague Tom Tait, the Anaheim City Council has established Freedom Days in Anaheim. We use that time to explore new ways to promote and protect the freedoms guaranteed to all Americans. Our focus is something regretful alien to modern American governance: instead of creating new rules, we look for ways to eliminate rules and bureaucracy, and repeal ordinances that place a burden on liberty.

In 2004, we enacted a Home Improvement Holiday. For the months during the spring of that year, permit fees were waived and Anaheim residents responded by making $28.3 million in improvements to their homes – a spectacular return on a civic investment of $772,240 in waived permit fees. 3,562 residential building permits were issued during the three-month holiday, with a construction valuation of nearly $15 million. It amazing how much free citizens in a free market can accomplish in a short span of time, if government just gets out of the way.

The following year, we established a Business Tax Holiday – a 100-day period during which all business taxes were waived for new businesses started during that period. We also cut business taxes across the board for most Anaheim businesses – while small, home-based and start-up businesses were exempted from city business taxes altogether. Businesses that had been operating without a license had penalties waived if they came forward and applied for a license during the three-month holiday.

Once again, a freedom-friendly approach worked: more than 2,000 new businesses formed -- an increase of more than 33% over the prior year – and 550 companies took advantage of tax amnesty.

When government steps aside and fosters an environment in which entrepreneurs can succeed, they will take that opportunity and run with it.

Anaheim’s “Freedom Revolution” has been called a new direction in urban policy, but in a deeper sense it’s an old policy reborn - grounded in the founding principles of this country.

Ronald Reagan spoke often and eloquently about freedom. Americans of all partisan persuasions intuitively grasped that is wasn’t just a word to him, but a deeply cherished right that he knew belonged to everyone. It was inspiring, and a primary reason Reagan was able to attract the support of so many Democrats and independent voters.

That same phenomenon is at work in Anaheim. The Anaheim City Council is composed of three Republicans and two Democrats, and I would not have been successful in enacting a slew of freedom-friendly reforms were it not for the support not only of my Republican council members, but of my Democratic council colleagues as well. We may belong to different parties, but we share a devotion to the classic American ideal of liberty, we understand that opportunity follows freedom, and favor public policies predicated on these goals. What is happening in Anaheim is a lesson in the power of freedom to bring Americans of all parties together. Ronald Reagan understood that power, and he used that insight to build a governing coalition of Republicans, independents and what became known as “Reagan” Democrats, and created a political environment that can still live today.

Love of liberty is the soul of the Republican Party. It is the reason we are America’s governing party – which is why we can never allow ourselves to drift into the belief that government is always right, that it can always be trusted with more money and power – and this is true regardless of which party is running it. I keep that caution in mind and remember that the real creators of Anaheim’s renaissance is not our government or City Council, but our citizens acting in a free market that welcomes their innovations and aspirations. What we hope to do in Anaheim is to be smart enough to get out of their way.
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Curt Pringle has served as Mayor of Anaheim since December 2002. He previously served in the Assembly from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1992 to 1998. In 1996, he was elected and served as the longest serving Republican Speaker of the Assembly in a quarter century.

A free-market nirvana has not arrived in Downtown, and never will. City Hall still has way too much control over development. And the marquee renewal projects -- PNC Financial's big office building and the resurrection of the old Lazarus-Macy's building -- were, foolishly, artificially inseminated by huge taxpayer subsidies.

Pringle, says Greenhut, has made Anaheim "a laboratory for free-market thought" and his success is creating imitators on the Left Coast. If Mayor O'Connor, a former local chain-restaurant exec, wants to see things really start jumping, he'll purchase the franchise rights to Pringle's "radical" ideas and use them to save Pittsburgh.

Anaheim's old downtown was obliterated in the 1970s through past uses of eminent domain and urban renewal. Now, the city (population: 328,000) wants to build a new downtown, and the target location is called the Platinum Triangle, an area of one-story warehouses near Angel Stadium. In the typical world of redevelopment, officials would choose a plan and a developer, offer subsidies and exclusive development rights, and exert pressure on existing property owners to leave the area. Instead, Anaheim created a land-value premium by creating an overlay zone that allowed almost any imaginable use of property. Because current owners could now sell to a wider range of buyers, the Platinum Triangle is booming, with billions in private investment, millions of square feet of office, restaurant and retail space, and more than a dozen new high-rises in the works.

The area is developing quickly, without controversy and without a single piece of property taken by eminent domain. Early signs point to an enormous success. "Too often, I hear my colleagues in local government . . . say that Kelo-type eminent domain and redevelopment policies are their only tools to revitalize cities," Mr. Pringle recently said. "I have a simple message . . . Visit the Platinum Triangle."

The previous planning commission and city council were harsh on small businesses seeking variances; the new council (which took office in December 2002) began overturning one commission decision after another, with the goal of giving local residents and businesses as much leeway as possible.

The council waived fees for homeowners undertaking renovations, on the grounds that the city would gain in the long run by the increase in property taxes. Anaheim also waived fees for business start-ups for three months; some 2,000 new businesses formed in 2005, an increase of one-third from the previous year. It also passed a tax amnesty and eliminated business taxes altogether for home-based businesses. Most cities don't like to allow churches to build new worship centers, because tax-exempt churches typically locate in commercial and industrial areas, taking properties off the tax rolls. Anaheim has eliminated most hurdles for approving new churches. Its housing plan also avoids "inclusionary zoning"--an increasingly popular approach to mandate that builders set aside certain amounts of "affordable" housing.

"Mayor Pringle is a god in our world," says Kristine Thalman, CEO of the Building Industry Association of Orange County. "He gets it. He understands the regulatory issues and some of the impediments to development."

Anaheim's experiment happened almost by accident. Mr. Pringle had always been a free-market guy, and headed to the California State Assembly when he was 29. He still brags about "the largest business tax cut in California history" ($1 billion), passed while he was speaker. He ran for mayor in 2002 at the encouragement of other local leaders, but not, he says, with a specific policy goal in mind. "I didn't run thinking of these ideas. After winning, I realized this is the smallest council of the largest city in the state. I could change things . . .  Local government is mostly devoid of exciting new ideas."

At the urging of then-Councilman Tom Tait, a Republican with libertarian leanings, he began to look at the command-and-control nature of local planning. He found a surprising ally in Councilman Richard Chavez, a liberal Democrat who agreed that the old rule-bound system was holding back opportunities for the city's emerging Latino community.

Mr. Chavez said he didn't know what to expect from Messrs. Pringle and Tait, but that both helped him early on in protecting the interests of some local businesses that were facing unfair treatment from the city. "Curt created a sense of trust," he says. That trust led to "incredible growth, incredible energy for the city and a success at providing housing at every level . . . . I get very little negativity, even from those on the left side of the aisle." Hermetic partisan politics drop away, evidently, in the face of verifiable success.

In many ways, the Kelo case incited a national property-rights mutiny, with hundreds of localities passing laws that limit the scope of the eminent domain power. Anaheim's circumstance is instructive in a different sense: By decentralizing bureaucracies and loosening cosseted government regulation, it has confirmed the vitality and audacity of private enterprise. The city has made itself a laboratory for free-market thought.

No doubt, most cities will plod along like Garden Grove, embracing typical big-government redevelopment policies. But success also attracts curiosity, other cities are learning from Anaheim. Many are in Orange County; but the story is spreading. Mayor Pringle says his ideas are being employed in the mayoral race up north in San Jose. He was most proud, he said, when Mayor Doug Davert, of nearby Tustin, recently vowed to "Pringle-ize" his community.

Mr. Greenhut, senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register, is the author of "Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain" (Seven Locks, 2004).