They’ve got to be kidding.
The Civic Center Authority decided today “to ask the Peoria City Council next month to expand the Warehouse District TIF to include the site of a proposed hotel,” according to the Journal Star.
That’ll go over like a lead balloon. I can’t wait to see the council laugh the Civic Center Authority out of council chambers when this comes up. This is such a bad idea on so many fronts, it’s hard to know where to start.
Let’s start with the fact that TIF districts are for blighted areas, and the Civic Center just completed a $55 million improvement to their property. TIF districts have to pass the “but for” test: “But for the incentive provided by Tax Increment Financing, would development occur in the designated area?” At the Civic Center, they just completed $55 million of development on the site.
On that last point, here’s a little taste of their logic:
Without the [TIF] expansion there’s little chance the developer of a full-service upscale hotel attached to the Civic Center could be lured to build on the proposed site at the northeast corner of Kumpf Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue, officials said.
I hope this is not the argument they’re planning to use to show that they pass the “but for” test. That’s not how the test works. The test is whether there would be any development, not a specific development like a hotel. Otherwise, you might just as well put a TIF out at the Shoppes at Grand Prairie because “but for” a TIF they can’t get a Nordstrom.
Then there’s the fact that the City Council already turned down a previous attempt to expand the proposed Warehouse District and Eagle View TIFs. When the Peoria Housing Authority expressed interest in being included in the TIF, the Council essentially told them to take a hike. What makes the Civic Center Authority think the Council will look on them any more favorably?
I could go on and on, but let’s wrap this up with the pièce de résistance: This whole hotel issue is the result of poor planning at best, deliberate deception at worst. As I wrote in a previous post, the Civic Center Authority said this to the City Council in a letter last March:
The Peoria Civic Center Authority is not now and has not previously requested public funding for a hotel. We have always hoped that a private development would be interested by the Peoria Civic Center expansion and upgrade to come forward with a proposal. We hope that the community will enable such a development.
The Peoria Civic Center Authority is committed and continues to be committed to the success of the expanded facilities. We believe it can be successful without an attached hotel but more and larger regional opportunities will be possible if more and better downtown hotel rooms are available.
To come back to the council with their hand out less than a year later, before the mortar is even dry on their $55 million expansion, claiming that now they can’t be successful without a publicly-incentivized hotel connected to the Civic Center is irresponsible.