HDR, an engineering consulting firm that has been behind many of the nation’s streetcar plans, wants to build a new headquarters in Omaha. The firm is very familiar with tax-increment financing (TIF), since TIF played a role in funding many streetcar projects and developments around those projects. So, naturally, it asked the city of Omaha for nearly $21 million in TIF subsidies to support its new building.
Omaha’s city council eagerly agreed to give HDR the subsidy, but for some reason that plan fell through. Now it has a new headquarters proposal for which it is seeking $15 million in TIF subsidies.
The amount isn’t smaller because HDR had a pang in conscience. The original proposal was to build the headquarters in downtown Omaha, while the latest plan is to put it more than five miles away from downtown, where it would probably pay less property taxes. Since TIF effectively returns the property taxes back to the developer, lower taxes mean less TIF.
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HDR’s current headquarters is already in Omaha, so the new building won’t mean a significant number of new jobs for the city. Nor does it seem that either location is particularly blighted. Instead, this is just crony capitalism at its worst. HDR is smart enough to ask for the subsidy, and Omaha’s political leaders are dumb enough to give it to them.
As the Antiplanner has shown, HDR justifies building streetcar lines based on the economic development that supposedly follow streetcar lines. But, as HDR well knows (but never mentions in its benefit-cost analyses), most new developments along streetcar lines receive TIF subsidies. Now it turns out that the company advocating the subsidies is demanding, and getting, subsidies of its own.
I’ve seen supposedly reputable national media outlets grossly misinterpreting facts/statements on both the Democratic Party and Republican Party nominees for president this year. And I am not really following the race, and I don’t have any special access to inside information. I see it right in the story itself, they play a clip with a quote in it, then they try to tell me he/she meant something different than what they said. And this is the news not the commentary!
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That makes it hard to be optimistic that a journalist with a major outlet would investigate this story… *sigh*
IIRC that’s Omaha’s mid-town area which the city council seems keen to beef up.
I’m a bit surprised I couldn’t find a press release from HDR from when they wanted to build downtown. Given their business, I’m surprised they didn’t make the specious claim about need to be downtown and needing rail-based transit to attract millennials.