> From: Rosalind Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Today's Strib has an editorial on the Walker parking ramp, and how > officials should better explain their parking strategy to us: > > http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/920187.html > > From the editorial: "Taxpayers contribute not a dime from the city's > general fund into its extensive parking system." Do other's on the > list agree that this is true? [TB] I think its true, I also think its very misleading. TIF money has been used to build parking ramps. One of the explainations that the City Hall spinmeisters used to explain that the Target subsidy wasn't the number approaching $100 million that was reported was that some of that money was used for such things as city owned parking, not a part of the gift to Target. True this money didn't come out of the general fund, but the TIF designation keeps money from going into the general fund (plus to the school district, Hennepin County, etc.) until the TIF bonds are paid off 20 or 30 years from now. A while back, I was shown an analysis the City Finance Department had done of a parking ramp that the Univ. of St. Thomas wanted built (built by the City). One of the reasons Finance said that the project wouldn't work was that there was no tax increment to capture since UST doesn't pay tax on its property. (triva question: Who gave UST the land on which their first campus building was built?) So, while we haven't used general fund money to build parking ramps, we have used money that would have otherwise gone into the general fund to build them. That we "need" so many thousand parking spaces by 2010 or whenever is a much a sign that we need better mass transit as it is anything. We can't very well be adding more streets to hold the cars downtown without ripping down buildings (not that we don't do that on a regular basis (RIP the original Times Bar and Cafe)) and last I checked the neighbors along neither 394 or 35W wanted the highway widened to handle more traffic. The City's parking enterprise does at least 2 undesirable things: It encourages people to drive rather than take mass transit by providing large amounts of cheap parking and it diverts money away from the general property tax base. Terrell Brown Loring Park [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
