Columbia Says No To A TIF
There was very big news out of Columbia, Mo., Monday night. The Columbia City Council shot down a large Tax Increment Financing (TIF) proposal in a 5-2 vote. The list of TIF rejections in Missouri is, unfortunately, short. Hopefully, this is the start of a trend, not just in Columbia but around the state.
The Columbia city manager and mayor had proposed an enormous TIF district covering large areas of downtown. The idea was that the TIF on several new, very large student housing developments would pay for infrastructure improvements that most people seem to agree downtown Columbia needs. In general terms, this TIF proposal may have been better than most, but that is like saying Mao was better than Stalin. Just because this money would have — at least in the proposal — gone toward infrastructure does not justify passing a TIF that would have enormously changed the tax make-up of downtown Columbia for up to 23 years and put the other taxing districts at a severe disadvantage.
Sometimes it takes political leadership to argue for tax and fee increases. In following this debate, it seemed as if just giving the new developments a subsidy and then using that subsidy for infrastructure was the easy way out. That is how warped we have become in Missouri. Subsidies such as TIF, Enhanced Enterprise Zones (EEZ), etc. are so common that they have become the rule, not the exception. Let there be no doubt about it: If this TIF proposal had passed, then subsidies like it would have become standard for everything in Columbia. And heavy use of TIF and other subsidies would be very bad in the long run for Columbia, just like it has been for the Saint Louis and Kansas City areas.
If there are infrastructure needs in downtown Columbia, they can fund improvements the same way they were funded for a century: bond issues and fee increases, with any new developments paying the full share of tapping into the system. Better yet, privatize the water and electric utilities and use that money to fund necessary improvements. Whatever you do, don’t count on subsidies to do the work that leadership should do.
