A Charlotte Observer story about possible incentives for the Langtree at the Lake development in Mooresville highlights the corrosive nature of these handouts:
Turns out the project’s new major developer, RL West Properties of Toledo, Ohio, never needed a loan in the first place. Town officials didn’t realize that until Mayor Miles Atkins arranged a recent meeting with company officials to learn more about the project, Atkins said Friday.
RL West officials told Atkins, commissioner Lisa Qualls and Town Manager Erskine Smith at the meeting that they were simply going along with the town’s years-long willingness to provide the development with special government-backed economic development financing, Atkins said.
Langtree’s original partners, including local developer Rick Howard and lawyer David Parker, who is chairman of the N.C. Democratic Party, had worked with the town for at least three years to secure lower-interest, government-backed financing to kick-start the project. They announced Langtree at the Lake in 2006.
Such loans are common in Ohio, Atkins said company officials told him, and the company never gave it a second thought until a public hearing last month where five residents complained about the loan.
So a big dollar project almost got a cheap government loan not because it was some how critical to the project but rather it was, at least where the developers were from, par for the course. One wonders how long it will be before this is the norm throughout all of the country and not just in Ohio.
