When Burbank Can’t Tell You What It Spent, That Isn’t Preservation — It’s A Blank Check

NEIGHBORHOOD - Ask the City of Burbank a simple question — how much of your money did it spend turning one ordinary house into a government-protected “historic resource” — and the official answer is that nobody knows, nobody counted, and nobody was charged a cent.

That is not our characterization. It is the city’s own written response.

On April 23, 2026, a public records request asked for a straightforward accounting of the designation of the single-family home at 1515 East Alameda Avenue: how many staff hours it consumed, what that time cost, what the applicant was charged, and how much of the cost the city got back. By the requester’s count of the project record, this one house had already pulled in at least sixteen city officials, staff members, and commissioners — intake, report drafting, legal review, a commission hearing, clerk handling, and council processing.

The city’s answers, signed by its Community Development Department on April 30, 2026, deserve to be quoted exactly. You can read the city’s full written response here.

1. Staff hours spent? “There are no records to furnish in response to this request.” Individual staff time, the city wrote, “is not recorded on a per task or project basis.”
2. The cost of that staff time? “There are no records to furnish.”
3. Fees charged to the applicant? None — “there is no application fee to apply to designate a property as a Historic Resource.”
4. Money recovered versus money spent? Again: “there are no records to furnish.”

Read that back. The city ran a months-long, multi-department process on a private house, charged the applicant nothing, recovered nothing, and does not track — will not track — what any of it cost. You cannot audit it, because by design there is nothing to audit.

“There are no records to furnish.”

The subsidy isn’t an accident. It’s the policy.

In 2011, the City Council rewrote the rules (Ordinance No. 3812) specifically to make designation cheaper and easier for applicants. The council decided, on the record, not to charge a fee “until such time that a large volume of applications” made it a burden on staff — and it has never revisited that decision. By the city’s own count, just 23 designation applications have come in over the fifteen years since. So the door stays open, the meter never runs, and the public picks up the tab every single time.

It gets worse. Asked how many other Burbank homes could qualify under the same reasoning, the city again had “no records to furnish” — because it has never conducted a citywide survey. It evaluates a property only when someone asks. There is no threshold, no cap, no cost control, and no cost accounting. That is not a targeted preservation program protecting genuinely rare landmarks. It is an open-ended, free-of-charge, unmeasured entitlement, and the region is wall-to-wall with old-but-ordinary buildings that could be fed into it.

Where the money comes from — and why the city keeps finding ways to spend it

None of this would sting quite so much if Burbank were pinching pennies. It isn’t. Until 2018, Burbank imposed no city sales tax of its own — shoppers paid only the state and county rate. Then the City Council placed Measure P on the November 2018 ballot: a permanent three-quarter-cent (0.75 percent) city sales tax that pushed Burbank’s rate to 10.25 percent. It passed 61 percent to 39 percent and took effect April 1, 2019. It has no expiration date, and by the city’s own estimate it hauls in roughly twenty million dollars a year.

That is the quiet engine behind stories like this one. A city sitting on tens of millions in permanent new revenue does not feel the cost of a free, untracked government process — so it never bothers to measure it, cap it, or charge for it. The money arrives whether or not anyone can say where it went.

What we’re calling for

We are not asking Burbank to bulldoze its genuine landmarks. We are asking it to stop running a public program it refuses to count, control, or pay for honestly. Four fixes, none of them radical:

1. Measure the cost. Track staff time on every designation matter. You cannot justify — or defend — what you refuse to count.
2. Make the applicant pay the full, fully-loaded cost. Every hour of staff time, legal review, hearing, and clerk handling should be billed to the person requesting the designation — not to the taxpayer down the street who never asked for any of it.
3. Raise the bar. Adopt a high, objective threshold so only truly rare and significant properties qualify, not any well-kept older home. Most of Los Angeles is old. “Old” is not “historic.”
4. End the taxpayer subsidy. Stop using general funds — swollen by the 2018 sales-tax hike residents are still paying — to bankroll a free, unlimited, unaudited process.

A property is either significant enough that its owner will gladly pay the full, accounted cost to enshrine it — or it isn’t. What Burbank should never again be able to say, when a resident asks a plain question about how their money was spent, is: “there are no records to furnish.”

(Helen Wong and The Burbank Republican Party submitted this story to CitywatchLA for publication.)