Week in Review: "Creative Solutions"
"This is going to be a million-dollar building"
Week in Review
City Council, Monday, March 17
Public Comment
Joseph Hendee asked why the Keefer House hotel project exists at all since Hillsdale College plans to expand the Dow Center Hotel, suggesting that the College is also behind the Keefer House: “Could you talk about plan B now that the Keefer project is dead?”1
Samuel T. Lair argued that the Council is misusing its authority with respect to the Neighborhood Enterprise Zone tax abatement: “I’m here to express my objection to what I see as a troubling trend in this Council’s use of tax abatements. . . This wasn’t a development that offered an immediately clear, identifiable benefit to the community, such as something that would create jobs, or greatly increase the stock of single family homes. . . What we are discussing is giving special treatment to a single individual to build a single residence. . . The proposed tax exemption reeks of corruption, and I strongly encourage this body to vote it down.”
Hillsdale College Hotel Project
Hillsdale College is adding on to its hotel, and alerted the city to the forthcoming construction plans.
Gary Wolfram, economist-king, mercifully exempted the Keefer House from the laws of competition: “I just wanted to comment that the Keefer House is going to be helpful for this project, and this project is going to be helpful for the Keefer House: there’s going to be an exchange between them.”
Stockford: “I haven’t been supportive of [the Keefer House], but since they’re working on it, if they are to complete it, I think it’s going to be beneficial for our downtown. But I really hope we can get past this convolution of the Keefer project having a direct attachment to Hillsdale College.”
Sharp took a break from Angry Birds to chime in: “Let’s just dispel the rumors. . . the Keefer House is going to happen. If it doesn’t you can have my resignation. . . It will benefit the community because there is a lack of hotel space.”
Westwood & St. Joe’s Special Assessments
Council voted to set a public hearing date for the sending out of special assessment bills to these neighborhoods on April 15.
City staff: “We need to go ahead and confirm the assessment rolls so we can start sending out bills, so the property owners can get them paid off.”
Socha forgot who he had and hadn’t hit with a special assessment: “So, I thought that we had already approved this assessment?”
Neighborhood Enterprise Zone Application from Nicholas Rorick
Searching for so-called “creative solutions” to the “revenue” problem the city faces, the Council decided that getting a. . . revenue bump?2. . . via a tax exemption program is more important than the equal application of the law. This logic is part and parcel with logic of special assessments; but one needs only observe how the Council votes on these two issues to see that much.3 With Mr. Rorick nowhere in sight as he asked for a $144,000 tax abatement over twelve years, the Council deliberated as follows:
Stockford pointed to the connection between NEZs and special assessments: “The NEZs do feel like special treatment. . . It’s really hard to reconcile the taxes that we’ve raised on residents for things like special assessments, and then to have deals like this. It’s unfortunate.”
Wolfram genuflected in the direction of his own legislation: “The purpose of the NEZ is to attract a builder. . . This is going to be a million-dollar building! I would challenge you to look around in Hillsdale and see how many other million-dollar buildings there are. So that was the purpose of the NEZ Act: to allow cities to attract buildings.”
Sharp, pushing the limits of smugness, compared the current $350/year in property tax income from the lot to the anticipated $8,800/year (to be split between Hillsdale Community Schools, Hillsdale City, and Hillsdale County—the city would receive $3,500/year). Sharp’s comment is evidence that Wolfram’s NEZ Act is explicitly designed to privilege the wealthy. Would it be compelling if, for instance, Rorick was only building a $250,000 home, yielding only $875/year for the city under the NEZ? According to Wolfram and Sharp, no.
Morrisey argued that the exemption is acceptable because the NEZ is already in place in Mr. Rorick’s new neighborhood, and that this vote was simply the affirmation of boundaries already declared. While there’s something to this, the Council neither needs to enslave itself to the arbitrary decisions of past Councils, nor to the programs of tepid Joggers.
Vear scolded Hendee and Lair for arguing against the NEZ and then leaving early. It appears to be immaterial to Vear that Mr. Rorick—the one initiating Council’s deliberation via his request for extraordinary treatment—did not show up at all: “We had some people in public comment try to address this. . . but they left, so it makes it difficult to communicate when you need two willing partners. . . We were listening to what they had to say.”
Paladino granted that tax rates on new builds may be particularly stifling due to the method of assessment, but added that NEZs are not a just way to address that problem, thus calling The Jogger’s entire program into question: “This tax bill does look fairly prohibitive on it’s face. But subjecting these to the political process every time is subject to corruption, to improvidence, to indiscretion. . . The ad hoc selection is clearly not the best mechanism.”
Socha wants to run the city like it’s the Broad Street Tavern: “As Councilman Wolfram said, this is spurring economic development in our city. . . I think it’s a win-win, and I’m in support of it.”4
Council voted 6-3 in favor of the abatement.
For: Stuchell, Sharp, Vear, Wolfram, Morrisey, Socha
Against: Paladino, Pratt, Stockford
This vote points to a serious problem within the current Council majority. That is, it revealed the default attitude with which most of them approach city expenditures and tax abatements, an attitude which also prevails in their view of Revenue Sources, another name they have for working citizens who don’t “economically develop” things. (Make no mistake: you, gainfully employed property owner, are but a Revenue Source to no small part of the Council, the County Commission, and, most of all, the quasi-public nonprofits and the public school system.)
In the case of our Council, six of the nine members, at least, tend to assume beforehand that any given expenditure or tax break presented to them is good until proven otherwise. This approach betrays their servile devotion to the words of the staff, and their ultimate willingness to outsource the government of the city that they were elected to govern. Thus, the bloated financial, legal, and institutional situation, a situation all-too-easily denied by appeals to secret knowledge of the inner business workings.5
A more appropriate assumption would be that all expenditures and abatements are unnecessary and frivolous until demonstrated to be (1) legally required, or (2) essential to the continuation of the city’s necessary services, understood narrowly. That which does not meet these criteria must be rejected. Certainly, learning what meets such standards would be a tedious task, and would require honest, perhaps not-so-nice, conversations with the Police Chief, the City Clerk, and the City Manager. It would even demand the thus-far unimaginable: telling developers to develop on their own. But the alternative is what we have now: moralizing sermons from holier-than-thou development scolds who wish to leverage your present and future for their business designs.
Upcoming Events
County Commissioners, Tuesday, March 26
External Links
“The city spent $150,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds to design the specifications for the project. The special assessment district’s $5,000 tax increase over the next 10 years will account for only 16-percent of the $6.5 million cost, with remaining funds to come from a bond over the next 20 years which will be paid back with revenues from the city’s street fund and sewer and water rates.” Corey Murray on the Westwood Street Project.
“Property taxes [in Michigan] are going up 5% again this year. . . . Since Proposal A took effect in 1995, up until last year, the taxable value increase never reached the capped value of 5%. Now we have hit it two years in a row. The last three years combined have given us the highest property tax increases for any three years combined since Proposal A took effect in 1995.” Steve Meyers, writing in The Oakland Press.6
“Justice Viviano has served this state honorably. His undeniable legal acumen will be missed on the court.” Rep. Andrew Fink.
“Abe Dane, Hillsdale County’s chief deputy clerk, said both he and Clerk Marney Kast are officers of Leininger’s group which he identified as the ‘Hillsdale County Republican Executive Committee.’ . . . ‘I vehemently oppose any accusations that this office participated in unethical or illegal activities,’ Dane said. ‘That is simply false in every respect.’” Collegian.
“The 2024 Hillsdale County Fair theme, Fair Necessities, also recognizes the crucial roles played by every fair participant. These symbiotic relationships have continued to form the backbone of The Most Popular Fair on Earth since 1851.” The Hillsdale Daily News.
“Road salt usage is down 37% this winter among Michigan’s 9,700 miles of trunkline highways. Barring a late season snowstorm, the state expects to use 175,000 tons less salt than usual . . . which would save the state about $10 million.” Michigan Public.
“Since 2015, conservative commentator and lawyer David French has been undergoing spiritual hormone therapy. On March 10, French completed his transition by finally endorsing Biden in the pages of the New York Times.” Josiah Lippincott.
“Kavanaugh spoke after Ford, and the gulf between the two testimonies was, in retrospect, an omen. She offered evidence. He offered grievance. She spoke science. He spoke politics. She was piecing together fragments of a story, parts of which she had forgotten. He was controlling the narrative.” The Atlantic reviews Christine Blasey Ford’s “memoir.”
“Trump is not Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini. But they share a rhetorical style, experts say. That’s because the humor is not a bug. ‘It’s a feature of demagoguery,’ Vinokour explained.” Michael Kruse, writing at Politico.
“Another way to fight off the efforts of disgust influencers is to increase your exposure to whatever they’re trying to manipulate your negative reaction to. Dutch food scholars in 2021 looked at the main public barrier to sustainable food alternatives such as laboratory-cultivated meat and edible insects—foodstuffs that would typically provoke a disgust response in many cultures.” Eat the bugs!
“The key voting bloc in American politics is not the black or Evangelical vote – it’s the Latinos. Now by far the largest racial minority in the nation, Latinos are also the great contested electoral territory. . . . America’s Latino population grew by 23 per cent between 2010 and 2020 to 62 million people. Latinos now account for 19 per cent of the US population. By 2030, they are expected to constitute 21 per cent.” Joel Kotkin.
“From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade . . . Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. A grim offshoot of this indentured servitude: Traffickers force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.” ProPublica.
“They are doctrinaire materialists, to whom nothing matters but matter. They see the reluctance of ‘many workers … to leave their families and communities,’ not as a potential of sanity and moral health, but as an obstruction to progress. To them the human economy rests upon the use of material things that are either not living or treated as if they are dead.” Wendell Berry on Paul Krugman and his ilk.
“In my view, Walter Lippman’s (1922) Public Opinion is the most important work of political epistemology (i.e. the study of how politics interacts with questions about knowledge and ignorance) ever written. Along with his follow-up The Phantom Public (1925), it’s also the most radical and interesting epistemic critique of democracy.” Dan Williams.
“The worry is that, for all its apparent radicalism, there is a basic continuity between integralism and technocratic progressivism, which tends to rule by administrative fiat. This suspicion gets some heft and warrant from the collaboration of Adrian Vermeule (integralist) with Cass Sunstein (chief nudger of the Obama White House).” Matthew Crawford wonders whether the integralists are as Vermeulian as Vermeule. Pater Edmund responds, but he’s not Vermeule.7
Farewell
Though your authors are sympathetic to Hendee’s arguments much of the time, he is out over his skis here.
This likely is not even true. All appearances indicate that the house was going to be built with or without the NEZ abatement. Amazingly, it seems the revenue-minded Council voted to take a massive revenue hit.
When inflation isn’t as oppressive, when all the roads are fixed, when property values are higher, when police and fire have the latest gadgets, when there’s fine arts and finer dining, when there’s more and nicer housing, when the airport is expanded, when tourism skyrockets, when “million-dollar buildings” line the streets, when your city has been sold for pennies-on-the-dollar to the richest developers, when Hillsdale has imported a new population and is somewhere else and something else altogether—then, and only then, will your governors be able to make do with less. So runs the prevailing argument.
A sensible business, for instance, will usually prioritize the expansion of its revenue streams, and thereby grow the business itself—precisely what the Council majority regularly tries with the city. This approach is wrong. Local governments exist not for the sake of revenue-generation and self-expansion—and certainly not for the sake of manipulating housing markets—but rather for the sake of benefiting and protecting citizens equally under the law. If development follows, so be it; there can be no guarantees.
But this “business knowledge” is not so much secret as it is impossible for a working resident with other concerns to comprehend. Most of the city’s spending is built into the annual budget, which projects for the upcoming fiscal year. This leads to two problems of understanding from the perspective of the normal citizen:
(1) Abstracted from the particular context, none of the budget numbers or supposed “needs” mean much to those who are unfamiliar with the sprawling web of relationships among and within the different city entities, not even to mentioned how those relate to state and county. This makes the Council’s acquisitions and exemptions easy to justify—if they even know what’s going on—and allows them to overwhelm ordinary Revenue Sources (who, feeling vaguely the consequences of their representatives’ shortcomings, dare to question them) with barrages of empty facts.
(2) By the time most purchases come before the Council, it is typically to confirm the execution of a budget item that has already been planned for. This leads to another method by which one might deceive ordinary people: the Council can, upon being questioned about a specific purchase, appeal to the sacred budget and its earmarked money. But don’t let these rationalizations fool you: to no small degree the City Council itself arranged things, or allowed them to be arranged, such that budgeted expenditures would play out this way.
We would add, however, that if this situation irritates you, there are other institutions taxing you that are possibly more predatory or more decadent than what is described above. See our previous property tax breakdown here.
The AxMITax proposal eliminates state property taxes via constitutional amendment, but would “absolutely decimate” local government, schools, community colleges, and libraries. No compromise is possible, and we are totally committed to a system of percentages by which you will fund your own dispossession. But, don’t worry, a rich man will come along in a few years and buy your home before foreclosure, and you will own nothing, and your kids—if you’ve had the audacity to have them—will be in county-funded therapy, and you will be happy.
James M. Patterson expresses a similar concern regarding the rise of integralist-adjacent Senator J.D. Vance. We find Patterson’s rhetorical terror unpersuasive, but he is right to find Vermeule, Pecknold, Pappin, and that pseudo-elite leech Ahmari repugnant.
Josiah's opening in that article💀💀💀