Los Angeles City Council District 9 generates redevelopment-era tax revenue, but state rules restrict where much of that money can be spent. Here’s what the next councilmember can and cannot change.
CD9 generates real money. Exposition Park, the Coliseum, BMO Stadium, the Convention Center, and the Bunker Hill edge of Downtown sit inside its boundaries, and the property value growth in those blocks throws off millions of dollars a year in tax revenue earmarked for the district. Vermont Square, Central-Alameda, and Green Meadows, the residential heart of South Central, where poverty runs highest in the entire city sit inside the same district, a few miles away.
The uncomfortable finding isn’t that a councilmember has chosen not to send that money south. It’s that, under the law as written, he largely can’t, even if he wanted to.
Why “wanting to” isn’t enough
Roughly 78% of CD9’s discretionary spending comes from AB 1290, a 1993 state law that ties
redevelopment-era property tax revenue to the specific “project area” that generated it. That’s not a policy choice a councilmember makes each budget cycle, it’s baked into the fund’s legal structure. Money generated by rising property values around Exposition Park or Bunker Hill is required, by statute, to be reinvested in or near that same project area. A councilmember cannot simply redirect it three miles south to fix a street in Central-Alameda, no matter how badly it’s needed, because the law doesn’t recognize “the district” as the unit that gets to decide; it recognizes the project area.
This is the structural core of the story: South Central doesn’t qualify for the money CD9 generates, and no amount of good will from an individual councilmember changes that on its own. The zones that produce the revenue and the zones that need it are legally separate, even though voters see them as one district.
What does reach South Central is a much smaller pool, funds like the Community Services Fund (about $94,500 a year, split evenly across all 15 council districts) and the Street Furniture Revenue Fund, which can legally go anywhere in the district. Compared to the AB 1290 flow, it’s a fraction of the total.
What the Next Councilmember Needs to Do
CD9 is in an unusual position: Curren Price is termed out after 13 years, his corruption trial is pending, and voters go back to the polls November 3 to choose between the top two finishers from the June primary. Whoever wins inherits this structural problem on day one and inherits the same legal constraints that shaped Price’s tenure. Real change here requires more than intent. It requires specific, achievable moves:
- Push hardest on the money that isn’t legally restricted.
The Community Services Fund, Street Furniture Fund, and Council District Real Property Fund can be spent anywhere in the district. The next councilmember should commit publicly, and specifically, to directing the flexible dollars toward South Central rather than areas that already draw AB 1290 investment and should say so in the budget document, not just in campaign promises.
- Adopt participatory budgeting for discretionary funds.
At least one 2026 CD9 candidate has already proposed this: giving residents direct decision-making
power over how flexible dollars are spent, rather than leaving it entirely to the council office. This doesn’t touch the AB 1290 restriction, but it does make the money that is movable harder to quietly redirect toward higher-visibility projects near the stadiums.
- Use the Olympics and World Cup as leverage — for the neighborhoods, not just the venues.
With the 2028 Olympics and an upcoming World Cup driving new investment near the Coliseum and BMO Stadium, the next councilmember has a real negotiating window to extract community Benefit agreements, job guarantees, anti-displacement protections, infrastructure commitments, that name South Central residential streets specifically, not just the stadium-adjacent corridor.
- Fight the displacement wave already underway.
Tenant organizers in CD9 have flagged specific projects, including a proposal to demolish more tan half the historic multifamily buildings on a South Central block near the Coliseum for luxury student housing as a preview of what unmanaged Olympics-era development does to a poor district. The next councilmember will face a defining choice on projects like this in the first year.
- Push Sacramento, not just City Hall.
The 33% pass-through cap and project-area restriction in AB 1290 are state law, not city policy. A single councilmember can’t rewrite it alone, but CD9, as one of the districts most affected by the mismatch between where redevelopment money is generated and where poverty is worst has unusual standing to lead a coalition of similarly situated LA districts pushing state legislators for reform, or at minimum for a mechanism that lets high-generating and high-need zones within the same council district pool a portion of their AB 1290 revenue.
- Demand the audits and hit the targets that already exist.
City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office has already flagged tens of millions of dollars in idle city funds and shown CD9 badly missing the city’s own 1.5% capital-improvement spending target. The next councilmember doesn’t need a new law to close that specific gap, just the political will to hold city departments to standards that already exist on paper.
Ultimately, the next CD9 councilmember can’t wave a wand and unlock AB 1290 money for South Central, the law won’t let anyone do that overnight. But framing it as strictly hopeless understates what’s actually available: flexible funds that can be redirected today, a negotiating window created by Olympics-driven development, and a legislative fight worth starting even if it doesn’t finish in one term. The real test of the next councilmember won’t be whether they can beat the law. It’ll be whether they use everything the law does allow and say so loudly enough that residents can hold them to it.
