Let’s see, the price tag for public bonds for the Kannapolis Soylent Green Farm has doubled to $160 million. Billionaire David Murdock is meeting with city and county officials in private to lobby for the deal. Here’s the gist:
“He’s a businessman. They have a model they want to pursue and there are a lot of factors to put into that equation to make it work,” Kannapolis City Manager Mike Legg said. “That’s the thin ice we are skating on.”
The campus is being built under North Carolina’s tax-increment financing law. That law allow governments to issue bonds without voter approval to pay for public projects within a special development district. The added tax revenue the project generates goes to paying back the debt. …
“They want us to do as much as we can afford,” Legg said. “The debate now is over how much we can afford and their interpretation of what that amount is.”
Let’s be clear about this, then. The added property tax revenue from the project would all be routed right back to help pay for that project. This means that the General Funds of city and county would see no benefit from the project because the revenue goes somewhere else. So, from a local property tax revenue standpoint, a Circle K and a few gas pumps would be a better deal than Murdock’s sprawling $350 million project.
Plus, as ever, Murdock has to attract actual private-sector biotech research to his campus, otherwise all he has is UNC system research that used to be done in the Triangle. That’s a bad use of UNC and state money.
Here’s a crazy idea: Why not just let the local taxpayers have a vote on the Research Campus bond financing so if the whole thing goes kaput, at least we’ll know who stood where.