Our $27,000,000.00 dollar purchase!
A former (?) city employee nails it on TIF’s and the ridiculous RR purchase downtown;
The city’s railroad property deal has been completed at a cost of $27 million to the American taxpayer, which equates to $69 per square foot. It’s not too hard to determine who received the best part of this deal and why Congress eliminated earmark legislation.
Tax incentive financing may have been needed to jump start downtown, but it is probably no longer needed. The footprint of those entities, who enjoy all of the city services but pay no taxes, continues to expand at the expense of the taxpayer.
In the event that we cannot receive a fair market value for the property, or if we cannot build without tax incentives, the best use for the property might be a park. At least that would provide some type of benefit to the general public.
I have a better idea, we rescind on the whole deal.
Totally stupid ass idea. The original earmark was to help cover costs to re-do the rail siding somewhere else and it could only be used on this project or it goes back. When costs (and self inflicted delays) made the new siding not doable, we had to go to plan b and that was to purchase the land and compensate BNSF for reworking their operations around the lost siding in DTSF. Like it or not, Thune and Johnson did some horse trading to get the earmark, it would’ve been idiotic to send it back. Have Charles take a picture in 20 years, and we will see a lot of new stuff that yes, pays taxes into city coffers.
And the letter writer is as off the reservation as you are, just because an “entity” gets a TIF doesn’t mean they pay no tax.