A man, living in an ordinary wooden house, has a preference for candlelight. He chooses against electric lighting, and places dozens of candles in each room of his house. Much of his time is spent lighting candles, with the rest spent telling his neighbors about the benefits of life-by-candlelight. So happy is he with this arrangement that he decides to add still more candles, and leave them burning all day.
“The lovely glow of candlelight through my windows will nicely present my house to the entire neighborhood,” he declares.
One day, he comes home from work, to find that his house is in flames, with firefighters doing all they can to contain the conflagration. A crowd has gathered on the sidewalk nearby.
When they see him, they ask, “Aren’t you the homeowner who filled room upon room with candles, and kept them burning all day and night, even when you were not in your home?”
“Why, yes I am,” he cheerfully replies.
The crowd finds his good mood puzzling. “How can you be happy about having filled room upon room with candles, and kept them burning all day and night, even when you were not in your home, until your house burned down?” they ask.
“No, no,” he replies. “You have it all wrong.”
“It’s not that I’m someone who filled room upon room with candles, and kept them burning all day and night, even when I was not in my home, until my house burned down.”
“It’s that this is the loveliest and grandest fire anyone in town has ever seen!”
A version of this scenario can be found in small-town Whitewater, Wisconsin, population 14,454. At Whitewater’s October 25th Community Development Authority, some of Whitewater’s leading excuse-makers planners discussed ways to explain a distressed tax incremental district as a success story. Rather than acknowledge their own mistakes, and imprudent spending, one finds them sitting around, taking about how to make lemonade out of lemons.
Tax incremental financing has been a failure for Whitewater, and all the attempts to rationalize away this abject failure (most communities do not have distressed districts!) through dodgy PowerPoint presentations and speculative ‘multipliers’ cannot change the fact. That won’t keep these gentlemen from trying, though.
A video of the CDA session is embedded below, with the discussion of tax incremental financing beginning at 15:28.
Expect more rationalizations at a public hearing sometime in the new year.