Today, the Dayton Daily News editorial board finally agreed with a position I’ve staked out as one of the primary threats to our society: Corporate welfare.

It’s a stunning turnabout for a company that has never met a tax break they didn’t wholeheartedly endorse. The ones for Reynolds & Reynolds, Relizon, Workflow One etc- were all great by their reporting. Bill Pardue and his QBase reality distortion field- where governments should not only fund his startup, but then hire his firm- hailed as innovative. And, then the NCR debacle, where our Ohio politicians hadn’t talked enough about how we should drop our drawers to the almighty Bill Nuti and his extortion machine.

If you look at todays paper, their hypocrisy is evident, where they rail against the tax break, but fail to hang Congressman Turner for his willingness to sell out to NCR as long as they are a Dayton business.

They take the tax break system apart gently, as a ruse to give money to big companies for promises written on paper as useless as yesterdays news-

One way of looking at the NCR deal is that the employees who have to move will actually be the ones financing the cost of wooing the company. That’s because almost $80 million of the $100 milllion-plus incentive package that Georgia put up represents state income taxes that will be deducted from employees’ checks over five years, but that NCR will get to keep.

Like most states today, Georgia isn’t just sitting on $80 million that it’s aching to give away. Yet, it didn’t have to put up much cold cash to get NCR. Rather, it’s temporarily foregoing income tax money it would have been due.

One can argue that any time a state gives a tax break, all state residents end up footing the bill in one way or another. But when a tax break is so precisely tied to what a company’s employees owe the state, it easy to see how they might think they’re the ones really putting up the cash…

The national trend of tying tax breaks to what workers owe the state is a tidy way for states to make sure that companies receiving incentives really are producing the jobs they’ve promised to create. It’s hard to cheat if a business tax credit is linked directly to the state taxes a company is withholding from its employees.

via Editorial: Employees to pay taxes to NCR | A Matter of Opinion.

So the real question is, if this is such a good idea, why not allow every business that is on the brink of tossing in the towel, just keep their State income taxes too? What? Only if you are a corporation, who pays your CEO $2000 an hour?

That’s the way our politicians have rolled… our country straight into the shitter.

It’s time for a complete and total end to all tax breaks, except those granted by the Federal Government to support initiatives to make our country more competitive or healthier. Tax credits for clean renewable energy, for job training, for preventive health care, walk-to-work programs, true research and development, child care, I’m sure I’m missing a few…

It’s time to level the playing field for all and end this insanity.

Thank you Dayton Daily News editorial board for finally seeing the light.

And, does this mean I can ask to keep my employees State income taxes too? Or don’t I pay enough politicians off to play that game?

Bill Pote over at Dayton Most Metro has a long post and a small comment debate going on about how restrictive building codes and over-the-top requirements are making redevelopment severely expensive at the cost of much of our existing infrastructure- and empowering sprawl. He asks:

But have we made these codes so restrictive that we’ve destroyed any good chance of bringing our long-vacant downtown buildings back to life? Is there any room for some flexibility and compromises that still ensure proper safety AND make it cost-effective to redevelop and re-inhabit our downtown buildings?

via Restrooms, Elevators and Sprinklers – Oh My! | Dayton MostMetro.

I’ve asked the same question for a long time (search old posts).

There is no doubt in my mind that many of the codes have been pushed through legislation by the building trades. Other rules come from the Americans with Disabilities Act, fire safety, environmental rulings (no more incinerators in homes like the one I grew up in). Many are well intended and good. As Pote points out: “I suppose we could just say to hell with handicapped folks and just make downtown a handicapped-free zone, but that would ensure Dayton’s position on Forbes’ list of the Top Ten Asshole Cities.”

Some cities realized that redevelopment will never take place if there are unlimited growth opportunities through sprawl. These were forward thinkers. Portland, Oregon, said that the city wouldn’t keep extending services and infrastructure outside a boundary years ago. Imagine if Springboro was still farmland and all those school kids who can’t get a levy passed, were still living in Dayton or Kettering?

Is it too late to stop sprawl as we build the Austin Pike interchange? At what point will we draw the line? The population of the region hasn’t grown at the same rate as our consumption of space, and that’s why we’re being sucked dry to afford all this new “development” which just becomes more to support with taxes? Should we implement a zero square footage gain rule? You can’t build new, unless you take X square footage out of the inventory? It might stop the reckless overbuilding of retail we seem to have, and of office space. Call is a cap and trade system for real estate.

Getting back to our existing inventory downtown. How much vacant space do we have? If you believe the survey, it’s around 30%, however, I bet it’s higher because some space has been out of the inventory for so long it’s not even counted. We also still define “downtown” as a very small area, which also skews the numbers. Why is it so important to fill this space back up? Why shouldn’t it be OK to build your corporate HQ in a former cornfield like Reynolds & Reynolds or Terradata instead of being downtown?

As long as everyone is going to continue to be car dependent and drive to work anyway, why would it matter if their destination is Springboro or Downtown? On first glance it shouldn’t matter, in fact, by sending all these people in different directions should relieve congestion since we aren’t all trying to get to the same place at once, right? Wrong. The existing infrastructure was built to concentrate large numbers of people downtown. When I moved to Dayton, Fairfield Road was 2 lanes and there were cow pastures where hotels and office building sit across from Wright State. Now we have 6- and 8-lane roads, yet our population hasn’t increased at all. You and I paid for all that, and we’re also paying for the vacant buildings we left behind, since they still require police and fire protection, and all the other municipal services.

Think of it as having your family stay the same size, your income staying the same size, yet having to pay to maintain 3x the space and automobiles that you had 20 years ago. Hello.

So when it comes to all the additional costs to bring old buildings up to date, from sprinklers to ADA, the real question becomes, is a building more of a burden to society empty or gone? Unfortunately, we’ve been creating empties for so long, it’s become almost impossible with the glut of space, to make the numbers work even without relaxed building codes. The variable that ultimately will save Downtown is the price of gas. When it becomes so expensive to drive, we’ll be forced back to concentrate where our infrastructure was built to support. But only if we don’t make it so expensive to bring the old buildings back. We do have one ace in the hole long term- if global warming does indeed raise ocean levels, one day, Manhattan will be under water, and office space in Dayton will look really good. So keep driving and burning fossil fuels- in the long run, it may be our salvation.

Unlike places like Chicago and Detroit, where they actually prosecute misdoings by politicians and their friends, Dayton turns the other way, or quietly ushers people out the door.

Forbes just added a corruption factor to compile the list, which Dayton would have made had we been honest in prosecuting the worst offenders (I’ll mention a few at the bottom of the post):

We compiled our rankings by looking at the 150 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., which meant those with a population of at least 378,000. We ranked those metros on nine factors: commute times, corruption, pro sports teams, Superfund sites, taxes (both income and sales), unemployment, violent crime and weather.

For this year’s ranking, we added the corruption component. We used the criminal conviction of government officials in each area over the past decade as compiled by the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice. This division of the Justice Department was created in 1976 to focus on “crimes involving abuses of the public trust by government officials.”

via America’s Most Miserable Cities – Forbes.com.

From the recent resignation of attorney Nicholas Gerren after his hiring by the County despite his low score and past problems, to the $900,000 logo by the Congressman’s wife on a no-bid contract, to the purchase of the Reynolds & Reynolds HQ by the Dayton Public Schools, to the sale of the Arcade for $36K to Thomas Danis, and his public payoff of Police Chief Tyree Broomfield to resign, Dayton has a long history of seemingly corrupt but accepted behavior.

The latest attempt to raise the hotel tax for the RG Properties private ice arena is only the latest example of how the process is polluted.