Apparently, we are supposed to believe that the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Victoria Street is blighted and therefore the developer wishing to build there is eligible for tax increment financing, or TIF. No, he isn’t. Neither the corner nor the buildings to be torn down are blighted. Determined blighted by whom, a developer who wants the taxpayers to help foot his bill?
TIF might make sense when a developer is willing to take a risk on a bullet-riddled vacant warehouse and turn it into something fantastic in a neighborhood with litter blown against the fence and weeds growing through the cratered sidewalks.
Grand and Victoria is not only desirable real estate, but it is one of the few corners left in St. Paul that actually mimics a successful urban location, safe, attractive, charming memories of yesteryear.
An outfit called Afton Park Development wants to create yet another apartment building there, along with retail space and some parking provisions. Go for it. Good luck. But leave us out if it. We are St. Paul taxpayers and we are tapped out, rode hard and put away wet.
Ramsey County approved an 8.25 percent property tax increase. The St. Paul school board, as though they actually have achievement to show us in exchange for their handout, approved a 14.9 percent increase in the tax levy, which includes the special extra tax that voters approved this fall. The city council approved a 5.3 percent increase in the tax levy.
And on top of all this, some developer wants tax increment financing to build in a location that doesn’t even remotely deserve the consideration.
As near as I can understand it, with counseling from my betters, TIF is a loan to the developer, but paid back by other taxpayers. The developer, Ari Parritz, wants a $2.95 million gift. It’s a damn gift! The funds borrowed from the city are paid back by taxpayers who forgo new property taxes from a TIF development for the term of the debt. I could be egregiously wrong, but it sounds to me that, for a time, unspecified, our property taxes pay the city back for the city’s gift to the developer who isn’t paying property taxes that could help lower ours.
(It occurs to me that it wouldn’t be so bad or that I might not even care at all, but I’m looking out the window and the wind is blowing snow around at about 400 mph and the streets will shortly be skating rinks.)
TIF loans – gifts, we should say – are most conventionally issued when a project might jump-start rejuvenation in a distressed area. So, who came up with the preposterous idea that Grand and Victoria is blighted?
“It’s (TIF funding) being used primarily for blight remediation and other qualified redevelopment costs,” Parritz told Fred Melo of the Pioneer Press. “The city already did their third-party blight study and it came back substandard on three buildings. Everything we’ve heard from the city council is supportive of redevelopment here, and an appropriate use of redevelopment TIF. It meets all statutory requirements.”
Nothing against Mr. Parritz. His wishing for TIF is perfectly on the up and up. It’s the game developers play. And the money involved is laughably pocket change compared to the billions of dollars taken from us in theft. But we’re St. Paul taxpayers, remember. We’re exhausted.
The new spread, not so incidentally, would account for the disappearance of Billy’s on Grand and the Victoria Crossing Mall. That corner certainly used to be livelier, but if you want blighted, let’s rent a bus and take a guided tour of downtown.
If the corner of Grand and Victoria is meeting the statutory definition of blighted, we are either in more serious trouble than we thought or we are not thinking outside the box. By the designation assigned to that corner, every household in St. Paul should be awarded a TIF loan. Why don’t we just give each other a little TIF here, a little TIF there?
The city is counting on us to be confused.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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