Friday, October 31, 2008
News Soapbox: Say 'no' to Amendment 2
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 6:03 PM
Mike Dobbins, a former City of Atlanta planning commissioner who now teaches at Georgia Tech, urges voters say 'no' to Amendment 2. If approved, the amendment would allow school systems to participate in tax allocation districts. CL recently endorsed Amendment 2 — click here to see why.
There has been a lot of misinformation spread about TADs and what the constitutional referendum is about. Its supporters have been using tax-generated funding to lobby, and I would say mislead, the public to try to get us to vote for it. TADs allow local governmental jurisdictions to sell bonds to pay for public infrastructure in designated areas where disinvestment and blight bring down the neighborhood and discourage private investment. The bonds are supposed to be paid back from the tax value increases generated by development supported by the improved infrastructure. Many advocates imply that without a yes vote TADs won’t be available to local governments to induce prospective developers’ investment.
But TADs are still available. It’s just that the school portion of anticipated tax value increases must be dedicated to school purposes. So voting no on the referendum doesn’t jeopardize TAD programs; it only reduces the amount of proceeds available.
A bigger concern is that TADs are supposed to support only disinvested communities or areas, not sweeten developers’ profits wherever. Early TADs, like for the Westside and for Atlantic Station satisfied this state-mandated requirement. Later ones though, like for the Beltline, have abused that intent. The Atlanta Development Authority and its Beltline subsidiary used contorted reasoning to justify the Beltline’s TAD designation. While nominally including distressed areas to gain approval, most of the Beltline TAD’s first proceeds are committed to projects in the affluent northeast quadrant, including buying out Wayne Mason at close to triple his original investment. By itself, this stretch of the Beltline would not meet state requirements for TAD use. Lower income areas were used for qualification purposes to justify expenditures in wealthier areas where private investment was already hot with no subsidy. In fact, far from improving the living environment in poorer parts of town, the Beltline TAD has fed speculation that has continued to displace many of the people that the program is supposed to benefit.
TADs can be a useful investment tactic for jurisdictions to help their lower income people and places. But if they’re not administered according to both the letter and the spirit of their intended purpose, they simply become another way of transferring public resources from all of us to fill the pockets of the very few. As presently staged and administered, TADs’ advocates subject local governments and school boards to intense political arm-twisting to give over their resources to prospective developers like Wayne Mason. Unless and until TADs can be shown to support the sound public policy purpose of inducing development in support of distressed neighborhoods, no further public support for their application is warranted. Finally, why shouldn’t schools’ portions of TADs be dedicated to support schools’ crucial roles in revitalizing disinvested communities?
— Mike Dobbins
Comments (2)
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Mike Dobbins always swoops in to make the sensible points others miss. I wish his commentary was more frequently available.
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There has been a lot of misinformation spread about TADs and what the constitutional referendum is about. Its supporters have been using tax-generated funding to lobby, and I would say mislead, the public to try to get us to vote for it. TADs allow local governmental jurisdictions to sell bonds to pay for public infrastructure in designated areas where disinvestment and blight bring down the neighborhood and discourage private investment. The bonds are supposed to be paid back from the tax value increases generated by development supported by the improved infrastructure. Many advocates imply that without a yes vote TADs won’t be available to local governments to induce prospective developers’ investment.
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