Narayan Mahon
Kevin Conroy, CEO of Exact Sciences.
It would have been cool if Exact Sciences had moved downtown.
But it was never as important, never as much of a “game changer,” as city leaders said it was. The downtown is doing fine and it will continue to prosper even now that the company has retrenched into an expansion at its existing facility in the University Research Park.
There was always a curious air of desperation about the city’s chasing of Exact Sciences. It put the taxpayers in a weak position as the city negotiated with the hard-driving developer, Bob Dunn, over the project.
Now that the whole project has crumbled — the proposal included space for Exact Sciences, a new hotel to serve Monona Terrace, a refurbished Madison Municipal Building, lots of new parking and more — the city is going back to the drawing board.
And that is a good thing. As I’ve written a few times before, the city had rushed to an agreement that was seriously flawed. The biggest development subsidy by far in city history was forced to a vote in the wee hours of a September morning and contained at least three serious problems.
The primary city objective — to add new hotel rooms — fell short. The city’s own studies said 400 rooms were needed, but Dunn proposed building only 216, and even those were to be built in a later stage of the project. To make matters even worse, there were plenty of hedges that might have resulted in no new hotel at all.
There was also way too much parking. The proposal would have included 1,250 stalls of very expensive, heavily subsidized structured parking — about three times what’s at the current Government East lot today. The prospect of the automated car is one reason to be cautious about any new investment in parking anywhere. But even if that vision doesn’t happen, less parking in a downtown area is always good urbanism. I just got back from Paris, where I didn’t see a single surface or structured parking lot. Paris does pretty well as a city. People seem to like it.
The project would have created a new and dangerous public giveaway program. The so-called jobs-TIF aspect of the financing would have given Exact Sciences $12 million with no expectation that the money would ever be paid back. This was probably not even legal under state tax incremental financing law, but in any event, it is terrible public policy. Taxpayers avoided a bullet here.
So, now the city gets to start over. It can insist on the right number of hotel rooms, drastically reduce the parking component (which will also save a bunch of money) and do away with the “jobs-TIF” scheme. One developer, who was summarily dismissed when the city began its breathless romance with Exact Sciences, had even proposed a project with no taxpayer subsidy at all. That would be a good place to start.
