EDITORIAL: City helping retailers

It may represent only a drop in the bucket, and comes too late for many, but the Laguna Beach City Council did the right thing Tuesday in giving some future tax relief to local businesses by voting to repeal the half-cent sales tax that helped defray costs of the June 2005 Bluebird Canyon landslide.

The voter-approved tax will officially end June 30, three years after it was imposed. It will have raised more than $8 million, more than enough to keep the city solvent while handling some $33 million in slide restoration costs that at first were not going to be covered by FEMA.

The scary thing about the landslide was that costs kept escalating beyond even the reasonable and conservative estimates of restoration planners.

It took $20 million just to restore tiny Flamingo Road, where the slide hit dead center, destroying homes and collapsing the roadway.

Flamingo Road has been open for a year, and homes are beginning to reappear in the slide zone. Congratulations are due to the city officials and consultants “” especially Recovery Coordinator Bob Burnham “” for making the neighborhood whole again.

While Bluebird is looking up, businesses in town are suffering from their own landslide of sorts.

The city manager is reporting a 10% drop in overall sales taxes, a reflection of the economic downturn which has engulfed Laguna Beach as it has the rest of the country.

In response, council members also took some other steps to give businesses a break Tuesday: They agreed to allow anyone to park for free in some spots in the little-used Forest Avenue/Laguna Canyon Road parking lot. Free parking there will last until June 1, and employers would do well to encourage “” or insist “” that employees park in that off-the-beaten-path lot and leave prime spots open for customers during the holiday spending season.

For all the bleak news across the nation and even the globe, Laguna Beach “” both the city and the school district “” is in a far better economic position than many other public entities that rely heavily on property and sales taxes to pay for services.

Property taxes in Laguna kept going up, astonishing considering the real estate meltdown.

The city is lucky indeed and it would be wise for local government to do everything possible to help businesses survive the continuing crisis.