Monday, August 28, 2006

Property values will stay down, taxes will stay high, until BCC considers return on investment

Folks, if you're not thoroughly pissed at the Birmingham City Commission yet, you're clearly not paying attention. Up until now, that was OK. That's what we've been here for. But we're here to tell you it's time to perk up, because the stakes are bigger than ever.

Taxes are too high, property values are in the toilet, and our downtown is in decline. Our commission's response: failure to act decisively on initiatives that would bolster Birmingham in the real estate marketplace, and an utterly premature and dumb decision to spend more than $10 million on an 8.3-acre park at Barnum.

You don't have to have your home up for sale or your space up for rent to be angry and scared about the direction of the real estate market. But can we reasonably expect our elected officials to influence the marketplace? Can we reasonably expect them to reduce our taxes? You bet we can. But do we? Sadly, no, not if voter turnout and community activism are any indication.

Maybe a few more foreclosures will get folks stirred up. Wait till interest-rate caps come off, and the houses are worth less than the mortgages, and the payments start suffocating people. Then more might be asking: Why isn't Birmingham more competitive with Rochester, Northville and Plymouth? Why is our city, which has the potential to be so attractive, stagnating? Why hasn't our City Commission made our town as good as it can be? Why haven't they improved the Rouge Trail? Why have they let that prime piece of real estate along the river remain a fenced-off parking lot when it could be the coolest, most attractive section of our downtown? Why haven't they embraced the Hilton development, and cleaned up the corner of Maple and Woodward? Why do we have two vacant gas stations at the gateway to our downtown? Why don't we have more liquor licenses and more outdoor cafes -- and why the hell is it that you still can't get a glass of wine at Salvatore Scallopine!? Why is the Triangle District still a wasteland, with a master plan no closer than it was five years ago? Why do we continue to squander the potential of the Woodward Avenue corridor as a resource for development and increased tax revenue? Why are we spending $10 million on an oversized neighborhood park, when we could be spending a fraction of that to create a true community recreation center by augmenting the ice arena, tennis dome, ballfields and skatepark at Kenning? Why do they keep listening to the loud-mouthed Antis, who have nothing better to do than rail against change, and who were marginalized along with Dante Lanzetta and Gary Kulak in the 2003 election?

It's time to start paying attention again, and time to start getting angry, because this time, real money is at stake -- your money, and a lot of it -- and unless you insist on a commission, or at least a commission majority, that understands the big picture and can move the details, your property values will stay in the toilet, and your taxes will go up.

Here's what's got our blood boiling:

* Dianne McKeon. We goofed bigtime in our 2003 endorsement of McKeon, who is often now the swing vote on the commission. Back then, we pegged her as an impressionable but mostly well-meaning commissioner who lived in and supported the downtown. Since then, oblivious to the mandate implicit in the landslide vote, she's sided with the Antis more times than we care to count. She's proven to be a classic flip-flopper. First she extolled the virtues of an extended Bates St., and then refused to fund a simple survey to get the planning process rolling. She expressed support for usable space above garages, and then voted the other night against a perfectly reasonable proposal from our professional planners that would accommodate them. Back in '03, we thought the impressionability was a way of endearing herself to her constituents. Now we know that she really can't make up her mind, and really does flip-flop depending on whom she's spoken to most recently. How do we know? She's TOLD US -- more than once! McKeon has said she will not seek another term on the commission. We hope she doesn't flip-flop on that.

* Scott Moore, Tom McDaniel and Julie Plotnik. They've consistently failed to marshall a majority for key votes, failed to work together with a unified vision, and have given ground on important issues. Barnum (which we'll get to in more detail soon) is a prime example. Moore, who told us in '03 that any solution for Barnum must be self-sustaining, and later said he favored senior housing or some similar form of development that would benefit the community on a portion of the site, changed his tune and voted in favor of spending an additional $1.5 million to demolish the buildings and devote the entire 8.3-acre site to parkland. McDaniel engineered the whole thing, after sitting on the Ad Hoc Barnum Property Committee and seeing first-hand how the committee, stacked with Antis, refused to ever seriously consider even a small amount of development. Abandoning his bent toward historic preservation, he now advocates taking the wrecking ball to even the oldest portion of the school. Plotnik, who lives close to Barnum and had previously expressed a desire to investigate development options that would defray the cost of an expanded and improved park, refused to stand up for what she believed, and dodged the freight train steered by McDaniel with her consenting vote. All three have disappointed us.

* Our newest commission member, Stuart Sherman, has been a major embarrassment to the commission -- and to Birmingham. Keep your eyes peeled for more on the Stanley manse. The Ethics Board is about to officially dodge the question of whether anything unseemly occurred in the whole assessment fiasco. You read our questions here, but the board has ruled that someone has to make an official complaint before it will consider the ethicality of past actions. (Never mind that few, if any, know what to complain about, other than the lack of any real truth of the matter.) Advisory opinions are given only on "anticipated future actions." So, community, buck up. Unless and until somebody makes an accusation against someone -- Sherman, the Boards of Review or city staffers -- the Ethics Board won't be telling us if the actions were wrong, or just stupid. And Sherman and his cronies will continue to throw up their smoke-screen, claiming that the city's assessment process is somehow to blame. We're seriously considering filing a complaint against the city, and using the public claims of Sherman and fellow review board members as evidence of alleged wrongdoing. (Remember, they claimed the city inappropriately told them to trash the records related to review decisions. Luckily, Sherman kept them, and his and the testimony of other members to the Ethics Board would help us mete out whether any wrongdoing actually occurred. We think not, but we're usually overly optimistic and gullible.)

* Another summer season of kids swarming the downtown, a bunch of empty storefronts, no sidewalk cafes to speak of, and NO ADDITIONAL LIQUOR LICENSES! How long should it take to get this done? The poop (and it does stink), is this: The largely rudderless commission is letting the lone voice against more liquor licenses -- who else? Don Carney -- dictate the pace of decision-making. Maybe by 2008 (sometime after the next election), we'll get something done. Don't hold your breath.

* Going nowhere on the Rouge Trail. Improvements were suggested in the 2016 Plan. Our Recreation Master Plan anticipates them. When voters were sold on the $25 million parks bond issue, they were told some of the money would go toward trail improvement. And we hired a consultant, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, to study the trail and recommend some specifics. If completed, they would enhance our town and offer an environment where, in a single afternoon, a visitor could go shopping, see a movie and walk a nature trail. But what does our commission do? Toss it aside. Why? Same reason they make every other decision: They can't stand controversy, they listen to the loudest mouths in the room on the night they're asked to make a decision, and they always seem to have one eye on the next election. So an improvement project that would benefit the WHOLE TOWN, that stretches more than a mile from Booth Park and Quarton Lake at the north to Northlawn in the south, and would cost less than $1 million if done right, is set aside. No matter we're prepared to spend $10 million or more on Barnum. Yes, folks, we couldn't spend $10 million on an eight-point-three-acre park for the folks on Pierce, Purdy, Frank and George if we frivolously spent money on a silly old pathway that covers virtually the entire north-south length of our city. Which brings us to:

* Greed. We don't like it anywhere, and we really don't like it when it seeps into government. But that's exactly what happened at Barnum, where immediate neighbors with vested private interests (does that sound familiar?) unduly influenced the decision-making process, and a group of naive and politically gullible commissioners decided that serious consideration of development options that would help defray the cost of an expanded and improved park -- to say nothing of saving a piece of Birmingham's history -- were not worth the risk of alienating the aforementioned vested, not to mention loud-mouthed and hypocritical, interests. So it looks like we'll be spending around 45% of the $25 million bond issue on one park, or upward of $10 million. That's instead of paying, say, $6 million or $7 million for an improved and expanded, but not quite eight-point-three-acre park. And do we have a workable plan, drawn up after reasonable public input? Well ... no. But they do say it will be an "innovative urban park," something along the lines of New York's Central Park. Without the urban. Or the New York. And what of the rest of the bond money? And any other parks and recreation initiatives? No plans. It's up for grabs folks. First come, first served. Your tax dollars...

* ... squandered. Just when our economy is booming. Automakers are thriving. Governments are flush with cash. Property values are soaring. Yeah, right. You wish. Didn't these people promise fiscal responsibility? Didn't they promise that any solution for Barnum had to be self-sustaining? Didn't they occasionally rail against "pet projects" and "frivolous spending." So much for campaign promises. The campaign is over. Now we're into another phase, where support for a dumb idea like a $10 million, eight-point-three-acre neighborhood park might be worth a few votes at election time. Here's the point: The phrase "return on investment" apparenly means nothing to our current commission. Where's the return on Barnum? Or Shain? (Wait till they figure out that the parking system, almost surely suffering from a dearth of shoppers with cars to park, just might not be able to pay off the nine-point-whatever-million-dollar bond, and taxpayers will have to step in and foot the bill.) Meanwhile, real projects with real potential return (modest development at Barnum, redevelopment of N. Bates St., rezoning of the Triangle District and the Woodward corridor, Rouge Trail improvements) go nowhere. This is a spiral in the wrong direction. Spending frivolously, and failing to invest, or even make policy decisions, wisely.

We could go on. We won't. Rant over. (We should have borrowed Alice Thimm's Remington.) It's your tax dollars, your property values, your city government. Reap what you sow.