THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501070120
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 45 lines
Some City Council members are talking about a ``retreat,'' another shirtsleeve session to get a better handle on city problems. The sooner the better, and the heck with ``retreat.'' The watchword should be ``attack'': attack with candor, not rancor, and not each other but problems whose symptoms repeatedly resurface.
An example is Corporate Landing, symptomatic of a couple of problems: acquiring properties to produce revenues for the city, and selling properties that drain city revenues instead.
The Virginia Beach Development Authority, an agency that seems to be independent of City Council until it can't meet its mortgage payments, acquired Corporate Landing's 400 acres. None were cheap. A few proved unbuildable. The rest aren't easily salable. This office park, on which city taxpayers have loaned the Authority $6 million to meet its mortgage, has one tenant: the Beach school system. Guess who pays its bills as well?
Is there a better way to pick what properties are bought for economic development? Is there a better way to peddle properties already bought?
That's the other problem of which Corporate Landing is symptomatic. The Beach's Economic Development Department has announced a couple of recent prospects: A builder of cinema complexes was nixed because moviehouses weren't on the city-approved tenant list - Why not? And who didn't know it? - or nearby neighborhoods'. Now Al-Anon is interested in Corporate Landing, provided the city and the state grant it tax-exempt status, the price per-acre is low enough - Lower than the Authority paid? - and the Economic Development fund financed by a share of the local cigarette tax kicks in a grant.
There are good arguments for public priming of the private pump that whooshes tax revenues and jobs. Good arguments against it include a city's getting stuck with multimillion-dollar mortgages it didn't initiate and with properties a city's staff can't sell. All those arguments bear repeating at a Council retreat, and refining into policies and processes that will avoid nasty surprises and recurring mistakes. by CNB