Page 594 – Show-Me Institute

Stunner: Both St. Louis Del Tacos Closed Their Doors for Good Last Night

Posted on July 1, 2011May 5, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

Looks like “saving delicious burritos” is now off the menu of reasons to oppose the Grand Blvd. demolition. KSDK reports:

The owners of Del Taco restaurants announced the closing of the company’s two stores in St. Louis Thursday night. Both locations, at 212 South Grand Boulevard and 1033 McCausland Avenue, officially closed Thursday at 11:00 p.m.

“We want to thank our employees for their commitment to excellence and thank our customers for allowing us to become such an important part of the fabric of St. Louis culture,” said Pat Shields, operating partner of DF Restaurants, LLC.

We’ll have more as the situation clarifies, but in the meantime, a classic DT commercial (in memoriam.)

The Eternal Struggle for Lower Transaction Costs: A Short History of the Modern Free Market Movement

Posted on July 1, 2011May 5, 2026 by John Payne

In his lecture "The Eternal Struggle for Lower Transaction Costs: A Short History of the Modern Free Market Movement," Show-Me Institute researcher John Payne covers the interesting characters and pivotal events in the intellectual and political history of libertarianism.

‘Aerotropolis’ on the Airwaves

Posted on July 1, 2011May 5, 2026 by Andrew B. Wilson

Show-Me Institute Fellow and Senior Writer Andrew Wilson outlined why the “Aerotropolis” bill is a bad deal for all Missourians on KMOX “Total Information AM” with Doug McElvein and Debbie Monterrey.

Full Interview

Where’s the Blight?

Posted on June 29, 2011May 5, 2026 by Audrey Spalding

Show-Me Institute intern Bruce Stahl and I went to Del Taco to see just how bad the property was. After all, city officials have blighted, and re-blighted, the property.

The flying saucer–shaped property seems fine to us. It has an operating business, with many customers. Are city officials just blighting Del Taco in order to award tax subsidy?

Where’s the Blight?

Posted on June 29, 2011May 5, 2026 by Audrey Spalding

The city of Saint Louis just declared as "blighted" the plot of land on which the eye-catching South Grand Del Taco resides. The business still runs 24/7 and gets customers, even in spite of the nearby bridge closing. Why would the city blight an intact and functioning business? Show-Me Institute Policy Analyst Audrey Spalding has an answer.

Green Acres, We Are (Not) There!

Posted on June 28, 2011May 5, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

If you lived in an alternate universe where Eva Gabor got her way over Eddie Albert, your version of the sitcom “Green Acres” might look a lot like this (via The Pitch):

Newly tabulated information from the Environmental Working Group, which is critical of U.S. farm policy, shows that absentee landowners and investors receive subsidies that, in the public’s mind, go to struggling family farms. The U.S. Department of Agriculture last year sent nearly $100 million to cities with more than 500,000 residents.

Not very farmy communities in this area got in on the action. In Kansas City, Missouri, 1,611 recipients collected nearly $5 million in 2010. The city’s boundaries reach into four counties, so it stands to reason that the receivers include people who drive actual tractors and combines for a living. But zip code searches indicate that the subsidies are also being mailed to downtown addresses and people who live around the Plaza.

A little back of the envelope math tells us that each Kansas City recipient received just more than $3,100 on average. As The Pitch notes, many checks are probably supporting genuine family farmers, given the expansiveness of KC’s municipal boundaries. But on the Plaza? Not likely. Pick the right high-rise apartment and telescope, and maybe urban farmers can see their fields being tilled from afar. Is that the kind of situation legislators contemplated when they crafted the law that created the subsidies?

Naturally, agricultural tax breaks aren’t the only ones subject to the ingenuity of recipients, and the malleability of tax credit language can often make for easy (and profitable) contortions of a law’s intended purpose. Case in point: Saint Louis’ blighting of Del Taco. Fellow policy analyst Audrey Spalding has an indispensable post about how cities “blight” property to award tax subsidies. A sampling (emphasis added):

Colin Gordon, author of Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City highlights one of my favorite examples of a contorted blight finding: Officials blighted a thriving shopping mall because it didn’t have a Nordstrom’s.

Because every mall needs an eBar.

And, just because I can:

Proposed Springfield Fitness Center Unfair to Private Industry

Posted on June 28, 2011May 5, 2026 by Charles Carson

Many of us have sold lemonade at one point or another in our childhoods. My parents taught me how to mix the ingredients, but I had to use my own allowance to shoulder the startup costs of my stand. I bought the supplies, set a price, and worked hard to sell my product. My parents wanted to instill in me the importance of hard work, and when the stand turned a profit, the money was mine: my risk, my reward.

Imagine if a neighbor opened up a lemonade stand next to mine, with one difference: His parents gave him the lemons, sugar, and paper cups — all free of charge. My stand would be at a significant disadvantage — assuming, that is, that friendly adults wouldn’t bail me out by purchasing my lemonade at a higher price.

That, in a nutshell, is currently developing in the Springfield fitness center market. In July, Springfield will begin building a taxpayer-funded $7 million fitness center that will compete for the same customers that existing private fitness centers already serve. The proposed taxpayer-funded fitness center is unfair to those businesses that took the risk of opening up a shop in Springfield without government assistance. It also shortchanges the majority of Springfield’s taxpayers, who likely won’t use the new center’s services but will have to subsidize the membership of others.

According to the Springfield Business Journal, the city’s Park Board claimed that “‘citizens strongly advocated’ for a facility east of U.S. Highway 65 and cited a 29 percent growth in population” to further justify the project.

“We’ve been asked for years to have services past 65 because we actually service all the way to Rogersville,” Parks Director Jodie Adams told the Business Journal. “We’re in charge of all the unincorporated areas of the county.” The fitness center, Adams believes, would serve those constituents. Not only is there a private fitness center already located in Rogersville, however, but the proposed site for the Dan Kinney Family Center is on Blackmann road, nearly a 20-minute drive from Rogersville.

Residents in the outermost ring of the Park Board’s jurisdiction already have fitness center services. If there were demand for more services there, the private market would provide them. The fact that it hasn’t suggests that a market for a new center doesn’t exist.

This kind of government-funded displacement has forced many other profitable private fitness centers to go out of business, or see a significant reduction in costumers. In Tucson, Ariz., for instance, a city facility forced a private club into bankruptcy. In Breckenridge, Colo., three private facilities were forced out of business within six months by a large city facility.

Government subsidies are able to drive out private industry because they entail less risk and opportunity cost. Subsidized fitness centers not only collect membership fees, they’re gifted with the initial capital required to build the center and have access to further taxpayer subsidies if the center becomes unprofitable. The center can also charge lower initial prices in order to drive competitors out of business.

For the Springfield proposal, taxpayers will shoulder the initial burden of $7 million, and even those residents who are already members of another gym in the area will pay the costs. Members of the YMCA and Ozark Fitness Center, for example, will have to pay for both gyms. “For the government to use taxpayer money to add another facility is, I think, a big waste,” said Dan Martin of Ozark Fitness, quoted in the Business Journal.

Entrepreneurs would take on the risk of failure if Springfield’s 29-percent population growth truly provided an incentive to build a new fitness center. Springfield’s government should not subsidize yet another competitor in a market that already adequately supplies such services to its community.

This proposed facility has an unfair advantage over people like Dan Martin and the other private owners who are pursuing the American dream. Unlike their new competition, they don’t have benefactors to help subsidize their costs. Even if many customers choose to remain loyal to existing fitness centers, the subsidized competition will have a far higher profit margin and take away much-needed business.

Chad Carson is an intern with the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy.

Del Blighto

Posted on June 27, 2011May 5, 2026 by Audrey Spalding

News that the flying saucer–shaped Del Taco might be demolished has the Saint Louis community of architectural preservationists up in arms. There’s a Facebook group with 11,000 fans and growing. There’s a petition to save the building. Even the mayor has been tweeting passively pro–Del Taco tweets.

At the Del Taco with Show-Me Institute intern Bruce Stahl. Photo by Josh Smith.

At the Show-Me Institute, we first heard of Del Taco’s uncertain fate at last week’s Land Clearance for Reclamation Authority (LCRA) meeting. At the meeting, the agency declared the property blighted.

Blighting sounds bad, doesn’t it? The word calls to mind disease, destruction, and decay. Yet as anyone who has visited or driven by this Del Taco can attest, there’s a functioning business on the property. You can still get your burrito and fries at 1:00 a.m. at the Del Taco.

So, why would a city agency vote to find this building blighted?

The sad fact is, blighting in city of Saint Louis and throughout Missouri frequently has very little to do with the actual condition of a property, and everything to do with awarding tax subsidy. Colin Gordon, author of Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City highlights one of my favorite examples of a contorted blight finding: Officials blighted a thriving shopping mall because it didn’t have a Nordstrom’s.

In Columbia, city officials almost blighted a functioning downtown hotel in order to award the building tax increment financing (TIF). At the last minute, perhaps after realizing how strikingly apparent it was that the hotel was not diseased, destroyed, or decaying, the council used a different portion of TIF law to award the subsidy. After all, it’s really just about the money, isn’t it?

Missouri law limits forms of property tax subsidy to properties that are blighted — most notably property tax abatement and tax increment financing (TIF). So the first step for anyone hoping to get tax subsidy for their development in the city of Saint Louis is to get city officials to declare the property blighted.

This isn’t the first time that Del Taco has been blighted.

In 2008, the Saint Louis Board of Aldermen blighted the property in order to enact a TIF agreement. Under TIF law, “blight” is defined as:

[…] an area which, by reason of the predominance of defective or inadequate street layout, unsanitary or unsafe conditions, deterioration of site improvements, improper subdivision or obsolete platting, or the existence of conditions which endanger life or property by fire and other causes, or any combination of such factors, retards the provision of housing accommodations or constitutes an economic or social liability or a menace to the public health, safety, morals, or welfare in its present condition and use;

Well, for the sake of everyone who has eaten at Del Taco since the city blighted the property, I hope that the restaurant wasn’t blighted because it was a “menace to the public health,” or was “unsanitary.”

If you look at the blight definition closely, it becomes clear that certain definitions could be interpreted to include just about any property. For example, what property doesn’t have “deterioration of site improvements”? Paint fades and wood ages. And, I wonder, what qualifies as “inadequate street layout”? I find the phrase “social liability” troubling. Who decides what is a “social liability”? Would a bar qualify? How about low-income housing? And what could possibly be considered a menace to “public morals”?

In case you’re wondering, the Board of Aldermen’s TIF ordinance didn’t specify which conditions rendered the saucer-shaped building blighted.

At last week’s LCRA meeting, the agency voted to declare the Del Taco property blighted again. Apparently, the city’s earlier TIF agreement didn’t fix the problem.

If pretty much any property can be blighted under state law in order to award tax subsidy, why do only certain properties receive tax breaks? I’m going to state the obvious: If the definition of “blight” is so broad that it can be applied (and re-applied) to pretty much any property in order to award tax breaks, the application is arbitrary.

TIF and tax abatement is not being applied to the worst buildings in an area, as illustrated by the cases of Del Taco and the Regency Hotel. Instead, those tax breaks are awarded to particular properties and areas that catch a politician’s eye.

The East-West Gateway Council of Governments has studied TIF and tax abatement, and concluded that using TIF where there really wasn’t any blight didn’t make much sense. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Maggie Hales, East-West Gateway deputy executive director, reported on the study to the St. Charles County Council during a work session Monday. Hales told council members the three-year study covered eight counties in two states. She said that overall, TIFs have a negative effect on communities and there are racial and economic disparities when and where they’re used.

“The TIF statute was originally designed to alleviate blight,” Hales said after the work session. “In areas where there isn’t any blight, I don’t know as a policy matter it’s a good investment of public tax dollars. […]”

Instead of blighting and re-blighting properties like Del Taco, here’s a better idea: Lower property taxes for everyone. Take politicians out of the process entirely.

We Must Go to War With Brazil Over Ethanol!

Posted on June 24, 2011May 5, 2026 by David Stokes

Among the mandates, tax credits, and tariffs that are all used to prop up an ethanol industry that depends on government support like a tick to a dog, which is the worst subsidy? I would say that the tariff is the worst of the three, followed closely behind by the mandate here in Missouri that a 10 percent ethanol blend be included in all gas sold in the state. I don’t like the tax credit, but without the mandate and the tariff, ethanol’s credit is no worse than other farm subsidy programs. So, the blender’s credit might be the least bad of the three, but it is still absurd.

Why is the tariff on sugar cane ethanol from Brazil the worst of the three? In my opinion, it is because it directly contradicts the main reason politicians say that we should be supporting ethanol in the first place. Of all the arguments for ethanol subsidies, the one that hits the hardest is that we need to do all we can to end our reliance on oil from the Middle East. Using American gas dollars to support governments that (directly or indirectly) fund terrorists to kill Americans is something I recoil from. So, in order to stop relying on Middle Eastern oil, wouldn’t we want as much ethanol as possible being used in the United States?

Well, apparently not, because we have this stupid tariff on sugar cane ethanol from Brazil. Perhaps Brazil is actually an enemy of ours and we can’t possibly allow American gas dollars to benefit the Brazilians.

I, for one, would gladly welcome war with Brazil. I think it would go down a lot like our war with our supposed “ally” England in the early 1960s. During that British invasion, our hearts and ears were conquered by English rock stars. I think the same thing would happen here, except that we would be invaded by supermodels instead of rockers. We’d probably have to arrest both Tom Brady and Leonardo DiCaprio because of their conflicted loyalties, but let’s all admit that should probably be done anyway.

If the ethanol industry is to be believed, the unstoppable Brazilian supermodel army would do little environmental harm to our country because their tanks probably run on green ethanol fuel. I don’t think it would be a particularly violent war, either. I think a lot of American soldiers would be more than happy to surrender to the attacking supermodels.

War with Brazil in 2012. Fought over energy. Powered by ethanol. Conquest by Gisele.

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