Thursday, January 22, 2015

Tax growth lending good in suburbs, bad in City of Milwaukee

Suburbanites trying to block the City of Milwaukee from using tax growth revenue, (TIF), to fund a portion of a streetcar plan had been asking city residents what programs or projects they were willing to give up because some tax growth funds along the streetcar route were to be used first to helping build the line.

Funny that you never hear the same people ask the same question when suburban communities routinely do the same thing:

A large mixed-use development proposed for Brookfield's Ruby Farm site would receive $7.55 million in city financing help under a proposal unveiled Thursday.
Those city funds would help Irgens Development Partners LLC finance The Corridor, an office, retail and hotel project planned for 66 acres west of Calhoun Road, between W. Blue Mound Road and I-94...
The development's property taxes from that initial phase would repay the city funds within an estimated 16 years.
The city's costs would total $12.1 million, a figure that includes the interest charges for borrowing those funds. Once that debt was paid off, property taxes from The Corridor would go to the city, its school district and other local governments.
As I've argued, the income and wealth disparities between city and suburbs is due in large measure to governmental action and the need of suburban GOP pols to always have the city to attack.

These development hypocrisies and double-standards, noted earlier: 
What's the difference between financing development  - - a big box complex or shopping mall or housing development in the suburbs with TIF funds (google Pabst Farms) - - and development in a city through construction of a development-supporting transportation system?
Didn't a big project in [GOP State Rep. Dale] Kooyenga's suburban district just get the benefit of a whopping, expanded TIF district - - all to lure and subsidize the location of an upscale out-of-state department store?
Noted here also a while ago - - to make the point that right-wing politicians like Kooyenga regularly talk about smaller government and a free-market economy but are all to willing to back and benefit from big government's big development tools.
There's even yet another huge, TIF-financed project getting ready for launch in Kooyenga's backyard that will take the last green space off the Blue Mound Rd. corridor?

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