Good TIF, Bad TIF: Even When It “Works” We Lose

The April 2-8 St. Louis Business Journal leads with a tale of two TIFs. For Brentwood's Promenade the STLBJ states "The city's bet paid off." For O'Fallon? A bad bet "costs O'Fallon $360,000." Presumably we're to believe that one TIF was successful, that there was a good outcome and another TIF was bad. The O'Fallon TIF may indeed have gone bad, but the bet that "paid off" did so for only one small municipality at the expense of everyone else in the St. Louis region.

What is presented as a windfall in tax revenue is simply the resumption of collecting taxes that were owed to the people of the St. Louis region for the past 13 years. But the Zoo, the schools, the community college and the firehouse didn't receive those taxes, they went to Target Corporation, Pet Smart, Inc., Bed, Bath and Beyond and others. Of course that statement is based on some assumptions, albeit assumptions shared by an authoritative study produced by East-West Gateway.