It's Not The EATs It's The Stupidity

Come on! You have to give me credit for that title! In the TIF world, EATs are Economic Activity Taxes (Sales Tax, Earnings Tax, etc). Typically, along with the abated property tax payments, TIF recipients also pay 50% of their Economic Activity Taxes into the reimbursement fund that goes back to the developer to reimburse for lovely things like parking garages. Recently the TIF Commission created quite a stir by actually asking for more financial information regarding a proposed TIF deal for two garages. One, a $4 million garage containing 290 spaces for the D.A. Morr Transfer building in the Crossroads. That's about $13K a spot for those of you scoring at home. The other garage, containing 151 spaces, will cost $5 million and serve the H.D. Lee building. Now we're talking! That's $33K a space! Those must be some parking spaces. Are they sheathed in original marble unearthed from archeological digs of the Roman Coliseum? I don't know which is worse. The fact that the TIF commission so rarely asks for financial information that it's actually news when they do? Or that when a developer comes back and says a parking garage will cost $5 million because it will be really really hard to build, the TIF Commission agrees. Why even bother? This is the kind of stuff that makes my head hurt. Yeah I enjoy getting out my financial calculator and doing more with it than balancing my checkbook, but come on. The real elephant in the room is that we have such archaic zoning regulations that they actually require so many parking spaces for so many square feet of building. One building, one garage. Gee, just like the suburbs. Yeah that's real urban. (sarcasm) Can you imagine what Greenwich Village in NY or Chinatown in San Francisco would look like if they had to follow Kansas City parking regulations? Would you want to go there?