From Larry Riley in the Muncie Star-Press:
So … coming soon to a neighborhood near you … a brand new tax increment financing district.
Hard to believe the latest TIF district, extending from northwest of downtown to and through the Village beside Ball State, will be the 27th — count ’em — TIF district somewhere in Delaware County, including inside Muncie and Yorktown.
I guess we could say this is the 28th TIF district if we include the one TIF district that, if memory serves, actually got dissolved after accomplishing the mission for which the district was created.
That would be the TIF district for Meijer and Menards when those businesses set up shop out in what was then the boondocks back in the mid 1990s.
And that’s one problem with TIF districts, at least around here: they never go away.
The theory of TIF districts is sound: a local government establishes a development area and puts together a plan to upgrade the needed infrastructure — roads, sewers, sidewalks, maybe even utilities — so private interests will invest in the area by building businesses, hiring workers, creating economic development.
Included in the plan usually are bonds to pay for public expenditures.
Then, all of the property taxes raised from the assessed value of the new commercial construction (and business personal property) that comes after establishing the development area are kept in a separate TIF account instead of getting distributed to the various local governments — city, county, schools, townships.
The money is used to retire the public debt from the bonds over a course of years.
At that time, so the theory goes, the TIF district is dissolved and the new property taxes coming as a result of the private development supports existing local governments. Growth in the tax base becomes growth in tax revenues.
This is the point where we fall short locally.
The TIF districts keep going and going. Until we have 28. Cripes, we only have 12 townships in the county.
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See the full article here:
http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013302240026
