If you didn't see the article from Steve Vockrodt yesterday, here it is.
The money line in the article? "Zona Rosa's occupancy rate has fallen from 85.9 percent in 2014 to 60 percent in 2017." This is what happens when we overbuild parking and subsidize parking garages. Cue the Strongtowns.org plug.
We wind up sinking capital in an asset that provides no direct return on investment. Not only is Platte County facing a huge budget shortfall for years to come, how will the vacant 40 percent of the shopping center get leased and help pay off Platte County debt when Metro North Crossing is being subsidized to the tune of $71M and will probably steal some tenants?
Anyways, all of the information being reported could easily be found by someone with a computer and some savvy search skills. I went to the Electronic Municipal Market Access website and did a simple search for "zona rosa" and all of the debt issuances appeared.
From this page, one can click on any of the debt issuance. I pulled the $19.2M 10/4/2007 issuance. I think if you click here, you can see it too. It should pull up a page like this:
From there, one can pull up the original document. One can also see how and when the bonds have traded.
What I like about the site, is it also has "continuing disclosures" tab which had annual reports.
I pulled the most recent one. You can read it here. It had quite a few nuggets of information.
The report had a schedule of annual debt payments. Looks like the bond payback increases to a roughly $2.8M annual average in 2022 with a $5M or so balloon payment in 2032?
However, the revenues of the district in 2016 were only $1,792,302.
I went back to the report for the year before and it looks like TDD sales tax revenue was flat from 2014-2016. I made this spreadsheet to see the annual change.
If the district is only collecting over $1.7M or so but the debt payments continue to grow, Platte County taxpayers are screwed based on these reports. I encourage you to do your own digging. Also, parking garages and parking lots are bankrupting us. Stop and think about the interest and debt we are passing onto our kids for our "free" parking. Building that massive parking garage at Zona was worth what to us?
Clip credit to Vox.
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