Today I was just minding my own business driving along the newly widened Route 45 when I spotted where MoDOT decided to protect people in their cars with their seat belts and air bags by installing sharp metal guardrail which would be fine except the guardrail is right next to a multi-purpose trail. This trail of course will be used by people who don't have safety features and any accident or stumble they have would result in the guardrail disfiguring or fatally impaling them. This kind of put me in a mood. Of course it could also be the fact that I was driving on this road on my way back from freezing my rear off at a kid's soccer game.......
I also noticed that this less than a year old guardrail end terminal which I think costs around $3,000 has already been hit. Maybe the guardrail should have been installed on the backside of the trail away from the edge of the street and where cyclists and pedestrians wouldn't face instant death if they slipped.....
It reminded me of my earlier post and gripe about the professional negligence towards non-motorized users' safety on Route 45. The misapplication of the AASHTO Roadside Design Guide in urban areas makes urban streets less safe than they can be. I also took the roundabout at 45 and K at 40mph because those DOT roundabouts are designed to handle the minimal amount of semi-trucks because engineering group-think designs for the worst possible scenario without evaluating probabilities and DOT's and DOT firms are set up to design everything like a freeway first and foremost.
Anyways, as I approached Route 9, I noticed that the hillside on the south side of the highway right after "THE National" had been deforested and remembered that there was a TIF approved years ago and wondered if some taxpayer subsidized development was finally happening.
I did a quick internet search and turns out, it looks like Parkville is in the process/has approved/has tabled a TIF that will divert funding away from the Park Hill School District. I thought maybe it was for the big hillside and that might have made sense but it's for a piece of ground with Route 45 frontage, two existing traffic signals, and is somewhat graded already on the north side of 45 and Melody Lane. It's the tract shown in red below. The Price ChopperTM is to the south of the site. Graden Elementary is to the right or east.
This site of course is SOOOO blighted and so rough that it looks like this.....
It's bad enough that the Metro North TIF is taking away money from the Platte County School District and the office to hotel redevelopment on Ambassador Drive is going to withhold property taxes from Park Hill but if ever there was a perfect poster child of the abuse of the "blight" definition in the TIF statute, it's this one. It might be why House Bill 1236 is getting some traction in Jefferson City this year.
I might understand the public benefit if NW Cross Road was being realigned with Bell Road and the traffic signal but looking at the site plan, this looks like more cookie cutter suburban auto oriented retail. I guess it would be nice to have a McDonald'sTM or Burger KingTM with a play place on that site since there are a lot of kids in the area. I'm sure a chicken place is due to show up in this part of Platte County and don't forget we could use another pizza place, nail salon, and cell phone store. We couldn't have more nice things like that without TIF.
The staff report can be read from the entire 277 page Parkville BOA packet here. Just look for APEX.
It appears that there was a special BOA meeting on January 24, 2018 just to talk about how much to give away for the development. Most of these TIF plans and staff reports are a bunch a pencil pusher busy work so I just skip to the tables because that's where the reality is. You can read the 61 page packet here and decide on your own.
Not only will the development site have TIF, it will have a Community Improvement District aka CID (maybe even two) so you can pay an extra one or whatever cent for the privilege of shopping there. Now let's take a look at the proposed TIF budget shall we.
The TIF subsidy on this run of the mill development is 35% of the project cost. It also contributes $843,122 towards the purchase of the land. Since is is a PILOTs (aka property tax) diversion TIF, this impacts the Park Hill School District and these concerns were noted in the November 13, 2017 TIF Commission meeting.
The last news article I could find about this besides perusing all the BOA packets was a January 17 write up by Jeanette Faubion.
While I was doing that, I discovered that Parkville also was considering more handouts but this time using Chapter 100/353 abatement programs to build an office building along Route 9 just south of the west entrance to Park College.
It's a four story office building with tons of parking because cars is what makes Parkville unique.
The consultant study lists this little nugget.
Here's the big picture question from the consultant report. They paint the rosy "but for" analysis that after 15 years, the taxing jurisdictions will be rolling in the dough.
If Parkville does this and I'm reading the report right, this means that over 25 years with all the increased traffic on Route 9, impervious surface, and parking lot maintenance, the City will net $507,000 in today's dollars??? That would be enough to pay for a traffic signal at 6th and Route 9 and its operational cost for 25 years. Is it really worth it?
Is this something a city that is already dipping into emergency reserves for prior eco/devo schemes should be doing?
Go ahead and troll all you want like I did because all agendas/packets/video can be found here.
If you are a Park Hill School District parent in Parkville you might want to think about the precedent being set because we are the ones that will pick up the bill with rising enrollment while the developer cashes the checks drives on down the road to the next vacant piece of dirt........
Clip credit to Isuzu Motors Ltd and whoever did their campaign.
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