CITY GIVES DEVELOPERS BIG BREAK ON MONEY THEY'VE BEEN USING FREE FOR 15 YEARS OR MORE

UDAG HEAVEN FOR JACOBS, RATNERS

Will Cleveland Council members let Mayor Frank Jackson, Chris Warren and developers steal away UDAG repayments in the millions of dollars from depressed, declining and diminishing neighborhoods?

If Las Vegas is taking bets, I want to bet with the mayor, his economic development czar and Bart Wolstein. I’m betting on the developers getting the freed-up money.  The neighborhoods can continue to suffer. They have excellent experience to do so.

I think this shows clearly that reducing or expanding City Council makes absolutely no difference. It’s up to the people of the city to for once stand up for themselves or allow their resources to be frittered away on developments that have no benefit to them.

You may have read about this deal in the Plain Dealer, where reporting the facts appears to be about as far as the PD's editors allow themselves to think.
The city has decided to reduce developers’ repayment of money – lent amazingly to wealthy developers typically at no interest and not repayable for 20 years – at significantly lower amounts than originally borrowed.  In other words, developers will repay at discounted rates money they have been using sometimes free for 15 or 16 years! Wouldn’t foreclosed homeowners like a deal like that?  Wouldn’t you?

In one case, Playhouse Square, the city will collect $1.7 million on a $5.3 million loan at no interest that was due – not in the future – but back in 1999 and never paid.
These buy backs are a total disgrace.

They will be made more so when we see how the money, which originally came from the federal government, given to Cleveland because of Cleveland’s blight. Instead, it's gone to the city's richest - again.

Rather than deal with blight, tens of millions of dollars have gone into the hands primarily of downtown developers.

This was the work of then Mayor George Voinovich and then Council President George Forbes. A pair of Georges that never cared about the public but enjoyed giving free money to their benefactors, Sam Miller, Dick Jacobs and the Ratners, among others.

In addition, most of the development also received 100 percent tax abatements, so they didn’t even contribute the property taxes that would have been owed on the new developments and would have gone mostly to Cleveland schools.

I hope to have more on this subject in the next column that runs in Cool Cleveland, Lakewood Buzz, What’s Up in Northeast Ohio and the Cleveland Leader.