The Madison Common Council should not allow itself to be herded into a premature decision on the Judge Doyle Square deal.
I know. You’ve heard it a million times – and I’ve written and said it myself more than once – that Madison’s development approval process can be glacial, nitpicky and inconsistent. There’s some truth to that, but to overcompensate by approving the largest and most complicated land development deal in the city’s history with barely a couple of weeks to review it would be a mistake just as big as the deal itself.
My sense of it is that this is another case – not too much unlike the Milwaukee Bucks arena debate – in which a community’s boosters and movers and shakers are excited about a big building project that the general public is at best lukewarm about if not outright opposed to.
What’s being proposed by Mayor Paul Soglin and others is by far the biggest public subsidy for any development in Madison. The $46.7 million in public subsidies is almost twice the previous record of $27 million.
Moreover, the deal involves important decisions on land conveyances, parking stalls and revenues from parking, ownership models and leases, the number of hotel rooms to support the Monona Terrace convention center, staging of the project to minimize disruption of downtown traffic flow, and a brand new and very questionable program to give businesses public money in exchange for doing what businesses do – create jobs. The deal is so complicated that it demands no less than 13 exemptions from existing city policies and the “TIF-Jobs” provision raises questions about its legitimacy under state law.
And yet the developer is demanding that the Council make its decision on the project on Tuesday night, only a few weeks after the deal was announced. There may be a couple dozen questions that need to be answered, vetted and weighed before the Council votes, but here are three that stand out for me.
First, the Council is being asked to establish a precedent by approving a new program – “TIF-Jobs.” Never before has the city given tax incremental financing dollars to a business in exchange for a promise to produce jobs at a given site. This is exactly like the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation program under Gov. Scott Walker that has been the subject of so much controversy over wasted taxpayer dollars and possible political meddling, if not corruption. The Council should get firm answers on the legality of this program, but more importantly it should consider if this is a smart road to go down from a public policy perspective. My own view is that it is a terrible idea.
Second, will all the new and expensive parking pay back the investment? Autonomous cars are coming fast and with them the very real possibility that they will be the mother of all disruptive technologies. If self-driving cars are combined with car sharing services, in the not-too-distant future many of us might be buying car subscriptions instead of cars themselves. The result would be the need for a lot less parking as cars would be moving from customer to customer instead of being idle 95% of the time as most cars are today. With 20- year bonds on parking facilities, will there be enough revenue produced to pay them back?
Third, the central reason behind this entire project has always been the need for more hotel rooms to serve the city-owned convention center. City-commissioned studies have stated that about another 400 rooms are needed so that the big taxpayer investment in Monona Terrace can reach its full potential. Yet, the developer is offering only 216 rooms. When the central focus of the entire project comes up almost 50% short, is the largest taxpayer subsidy in city history still justified?
This developer, like others, routinely employs the tactic of pushing policy makers to make premature decisions, threatening to end the deal and blame the Council if they don’t get what they want. They did this on the Edgewater Hotel, the Bucks owners did it on their arena in Milwaukee and now it’s happening again on JDS.
The Council should resist this tactic. For one thing, the developer is probably bluffing. JDS/Majestic has so much time and money invested in this proposal that they won’t just walk away if they don’t get an answer until the end of the year – which is a more realistic time frame to get questions answered and a robust public vetting completed.
And what if they do walk away? Madison is not and should not be desperate. Our downtown is in fine shape and getting better. If this isn’t the right deal for an important part of our city then let’s move on to another idea. It’s not like there aren’t other suitors waiting in the wings to step forward.
At the end of the day, once all the questions are answered as best they can be, once the public and the Council have had a chance to digest that information, and once all the ramifications have been considered and weighed, maybe a majority of the Council will decide that the benefits trump the risks and we should move forward. If they make that decision after careful consideration the public might support it or at least respect the outcome.
But if the Council rushes to judgment on Tuesday night or anytime before it is ready we’ll be left with questions about the Council’s judgment itself.