After his colleagues voted to sell a city-owned theater for $12.5 million (a deal that will help recoup some of the $21.5 million the city’s taxpayers owe for the building), Roanoke Rapids’ mayor waxed philosophical:
Mayor Drewery Beale said the city made mistakes in its past theater
development as it tried to find economic opportunity after the city’s
textile base collapsed.“We went so fast. Maybe we went too fast,” he said.
That’s a nice thought, but a slow, more thorough process still would have failed as long as Roanoke Rapids planned to use Tax Increment Financing to insert government into a project that should have been left entirely to the private sector.
