Train Robbers: The Scaleybark Heist
If anybody needed further proof that the promises and assurances of grand economic development spurred by Charlotte’s half-billion-dollar McCrory Blue Line ring as hollow today as they did pre-recession, the uptown paper’s Steve Harrison delivers with this devastating catch-up of how the vaunted Scaleybark development has floundered.
This should come as no surprise, least of all that trouble securing federal tax credits would be an issue. The city and CATS knew with absolute certainty, back in 2007, that securing such was a losing proposition. How did they know? Recall that a BOA-led development team was originally in line to grab a fat subsidy to handle the Scaleybark station. The banking titan was forced to scrap the deal when it became clear that … wait for it … federal tax credits could not be secured. Imagine that.
That set off a mad scramble to find another developer willing to purchase 16 acres that the city had purchased for $9.3 million. Peter Pappas’ Scaleybark Development Partners swooped in and snagged the land for the fire-sale price of about $5 million.
The late, great Don Lochman summed up best the twisted road of economic development meetings that ultimately ended with the Scaleybark deal. This from The Rhino Times, circa 2007:
Councilmember Don Lochman, a Republican who is a member of the council’s economic development and planning committee, wasn’t thrilled with any of the proposals reviewed last week.
“I think it was one of the worst meetings I’ve attended in seven years,” Lochman said. “You wouldn’t spend your money this way.”
And yet, of course, they did. The rest, as the say, is history. The stretch of South Boulevard that city leaders assured held such glowing potential for economic development, but for a missing light-rail line and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, lays largely in ruin, a wasteland of empty promise and shelled buildings, with an abandoned BBQ joint and government-owned booze store at one end and a government-owned transit station and government-subsidized arena at the other, soon to be expanded full steam ahead to a government-owned institution of higher learning.
It’s a history from which city leaders could learn a valuable lesson, but more likely will steadfastly ignore, opting instead to spin it somehow as a win for the children, or the poor, or the future, or something.
Anything but reality.
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