MeckCo Fire Sale
The uptown paper of record catches up on a question that House Guest columnist Wayne Powers asked Commissioner Harold Cogdell last week, when Powers was guest hosting WBT’s The Pete Kaliner Show. To wit: would the county be willing to sell some of its assets to help plug a projected $95 million budget gap?
Predictably, the uptown paper and county officials immediately pull the emotional trigger, targeting assets like public golf courses and inner-city pools. I’m shocked libraries didn’t make the list. Meanwhile, huge tracts of prime uptown real estate the county has been swapping around as lures to land a minor league baseball stadium for Center City don’t even rate a passing mention. The baseball deal centers on a parcel in Third Ward that the county originally purchased for about $28 million. Then there’s Second Ward, where the county’s largess is kicking in about $8 million for an urban park to compliment a proposed mixed-use development.
County Manager Harry Jones says he hasn’t compiled a formal list of assets that the county could sell, or what they’d be worth, but concedes the idea is on the table for consideration. Critics of that approach argue that a slumping real estate market would likely yield a bad deal on properties, and the county’s budget director says it’s at best a short-term fix that won’t solve a long-term problem. Jeff Taylor dispatches such nonsense in short order, pointing out that the county would actually be “transforming a liability into an asset; a tax-eater into a tax-producer”.
But that would mean county officials and kingmakers relinquishing power and land holdings, and we can’t have that, can we?
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