This will be one of the rare times you’ll see the name of a living current or retired non-Supreme Court judge on this medium. Mainly because I mentioned him before, but in a context not related to his tenure on the bench.
P-D:
Judge throws out McKee’s NorthSide TIF
A St. Louis judge Friday morning dealt a major blow to developer Paul McKee’s $8.1 billion NorthSide redevelopment proposal, when he threw out a key city ordinance that was to help finance the deal.
Circuit Judge Robert Dierker voided the $390 million tax increment financing package approved last fall by city aldermen, saying, essentially, that they based their vote on too little firm evidence of what the plan would entail.
Specifically, Dierker wrote, declaring 1,100 acres of the city blighted “in one fell swoop” on behalf of what, at this point, is such a speculative project, violates the statutes that govern TIF. While NorthSide is often described as a “plan,” it is not yet, Dierker wrote, a specific “project,” and thus is too vague to justify blighting, incentives and the potential use of eminent domain.
So, while Dierker wrote that he “does not relish the role of playing naysayer to what could be an inspired vision,” he said he had little choice but to overturn the TIF ordinance, and rule favor of the local residents who brought the suit.
The big irony here is that the main energy of opposition to the McKee project and the use of TIF for it comes from north side black politicos, and/or other black activists, like Lizz Brown, Onion Horton and Antonio French. Yet, it took one of the most conservative judges in the State Court Circuit that serves St. Louis City to knock it back, at least for awhile.
UPDATE 7/7: The last real journalist in St. Louis has dug up some interesting facts from Dierker’s 51-page opinion (some Supreme Court rulings should be so short):
In his ruling, Dierker mentioned the testimony of Michele Boldrin, chairman of the economics department at Washington University. The testimony was in February, and it was devastating. Boldrin had reviewed the documents McKee submitted to the city for tax increment financing.
“This is something, if an MBA student came up with it, I’d throw him out of my office,” Boldrin testified. He also ridiculed the notion that McKee could sell $2.6 billion worth of single-family homes for an average price of more than $450,000. That’s almost 6,000 homes.
Maybe, JUST MAYBE, during the height of yuppie gentrification of certain parts of St. Louis city, in the middle of the last decade, you could have gotten 450 for a house if it: (1) Was well maintained or well rehabbed, (2) Was old enough and had a curious enough historical value or appearance, (3) Was sitting in certain desirable neighborhoods in the City, ones like Benton Park and Soulard, that remained mostly white even before the yuppification process began, (4) Was large enough in terms of square footage, (5) Had a big enough yard, and (6) Had a garage, either an existing garage from its original construction, or a new one as part of rehabbing, and (7) As long as the banks were drawing mortgages like candy during the good times of the assumption of perpetually rising real estate and a low interest rate climate.
But, McKee’s financial plan had several things going against it: (1) This neighborhood has been ghetto for a very long time, since at least the 1950s, (2) These houses would have been new, and therefore, at best, would have only minor hints of the old time German “meisterbauer” Kraut salt flats, not the real McCoy, (3) Wouldn’t have been way too big in SFage, nor have had three levels and a basement, (4) Banks have, for good reason, gotten tighter than a prisoner’s asshole when it comes to mortgage or any other lending, and interest rates will soon be shooting up because of Federal borrowing. There is no way in hell (or North St. Louis, whatever your pleasure), that he could have averaged 450 in reality.
UPDATE 7/12: P-D Editorial Board pwn3s Dierker:
The judge failed to note that the NorthSide vision created unprecedented political consensus in Missouri. A lot of people who don’t ordinarily get along wanted to make it happen.
Mr. McKee is best known for building large commercial projects in the suburbs. He invested millions of dollars of his own money and, over five years, acquired parcels of property and pieced together a development site.
Former Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican, convened a special session of the Republican-controlled Missouri Legislature in 2007 to approve a special tax credit for the project. The tax credit supports assembling large tracts of land in distressed urban areas and was enacted with this project in mind.
NorthSide has enjoyed strong support from three African-American aldermen in whose wards the project site lies — even over objections of constituents who justifiably were angered by Mr. McKee’s neglect of properties he had acquired.
The development ordinances struck down by Judge Dierker — including authorization of more than $150 million in tax increment financing for streets, sidewalks, sewers, utilities and other public improvements in two areas of the development site — easily won approval from the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.
The project is touted by both Missouri U.S. senators, Republican Christopher S. “Kit” Bond and Democrat Claire McCaskill. U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Sean Donovan noted their bipartisan support when he visited parts of the NorthSide development site in May.
So, on one side, you’ve got One-Term Matty, former House Speaker “Reparations” Rod Jetton, black City aldermen, Kit “Section 8” Bond, Claire “Queen of the Nursing Homes” McCaskill, and one of Obama’s over-educated Ivy League twits in the Cabinet. On the other side, you’ve got Larry Dierker. Gee, on which side will I come down?
UPDATE 7/13: P-D op-ed today does just the opposite, calls McKee’s education side-plans for the “redevelopment area” a vacuous pie-in-the-sky boondoggle, then has the good sense to recognize that the same was true of his entire re-development plan. Seems like I know of a major metro area newspaper’s in-house editorial board that needs to read that one very carefully.
From today’s:
When trying to hand over the largest tax-increment financing package in St. Louis history last year, it seemed that Mayor Francis Slay and his aldermanic aces may have overlooked the thick print. The McEagle website provides a rather nebulous education strategy, but even the savviest statesman can swallow the promise of a few flimsy marketing words when the campaign checks arrive. Maybe we can reduce dropout rates and rebuild our roughest schools with the fruits of some creative public financing schemes.
McEagle’s website says it will “help start the foundation for community schools to expand and thrive.” Between the lines, I read “through a decentralization of poverty and recentralization of affluence, we can shift our lower-performing students to other impoverished areas and improve academic standards for marketing purposes.”
Tracking McKee-influenced contributions that found their way into the pockets of politicians like Mayor Slay, Missouri House Speaker Ron Richard and various other local leaders makes me wonder if our elected officials tried to sell the soil right from underneath some of St. Louis’ most at-risk citizens.
“Decentralization of poverty and recentralization of affluence.” Translation: Blacks out, white liberal yuppies in. This perhaps is a clue that the “conspiracy theory” I’ve heard from real estate pros in The City about the Slay-Dooley tacit agreement re Section 8 vouchers is true. Unfortunately for McKee, as I said above, the only kinds of city neighborhoods the yuppie libs loved so much were ones that hadn’t gone majority black yet, for whatever reason. AFAIK, they didn’t venture into heavily black neighborhoods and do their yuppie rehabbing.
And this explains why the P-D ed board can go on and on about how Missouri’s and St. Louis’s politicians love McKee’s plan so much. That’s because he’s passing around the palm grease like candy.
Countenance Blog 