Addicted to Subsdies

I visited the Libertarian Party booth at the State Fair yesterday and got to talking property rights issues with a Libertarian from the Bolivar area. Seems that they're having a big flap down there on a TIF (Tax Increment Financing) project at one of the new interchanges on the new 4-lane MO-13. A big developer convinced the city to give him a sales tax TIF. The Polk County Commission and Sheriff are dubious about supporting the development by giving up their share of sales taxes and are apparently going to sue the City to get out of it.

Their county officials are a bit slower than ours were back in 1998 when a local proposal was shot down - Ray Fitterling (not to mention his election opponents) all let the city know where the County would stand before the city council voted, and it failed 3-2. There, Bolivar has already approved the TIF before the Polk County commissioners got excited (probably after hearing from constituents in the rest of the county).

Why is this of interest to us in Johnson County? Well, guess who the developer is - yep, it's CEAH - the same folks who are sucking that 1/2 cent extra tax out of Wal-Mart shoppers to support their Hawthorne development. It appears they specialize in getting the rubes in small towns to underwrite their speculative developments (I don't care if you have a PhD, whenever you let the sharp operators fast talk and scam you, you are a "rube" by definition). I wonder where else CEAH is playng this game.

In Liberty