The $800 million plus insured by the quarter percent extra sales tax by Cuyahoga County Commissioners wasn’t sugary enough for MMPI and the Chicago Kennedys. So the Ohio State Legislature added more sweeteners to the deal.
The County is collecting some $40 million a year on the tax passed by Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora’s vote without public input. The tax lasts 20 years (if you believe that). The revenue goes to MMPI, a private developer and operator.
The County has given very little information on how the nearly $100 million already collected is being spent. The Plain Dealer – bastion of County reform – has neglected to tell the public exactly how the money is being spent.
The private nature of the business means MMPI should pay property taxes because it will be MMPI’s private business to operate the facilities.
The MMPI private operation will pay no property taxes and to make sure it’s as tasty as possible, MMPI will have to pay NO SALES TAXES on the building materials used to do the job. Ironic, since the extra sales tax goes to MMPI.
Now how’s that for having your cake and being able to eat it too.
You may have missed the news about this give-away in the Plain Dealer. I likely would have too but Crain’s Business in its daily news alert highlighted the article. The PD had a one-paragraph mention of the gifts to MMPI. This news was in the run-over page and 20 paragraphs into the Metro story on Casinos.
Here’s the Crain’s alert from Friday here
Here’s the Plain Dealer one paragraph about this major gift in Saturday’s paper:
That’s it. No estimate of how many millions of dollars this will cost the County, mostly actually the Cleveland school system. Cleveland schools get more than 50 percent of the property tax revenue since the facility is located in Cleveland.
Hear any outcry from Mayor Frank Jackson?
We just can’t keep our legislators from pouring sugared dollars into the pockets of billionaires. One of the Kennedy family members in this case. Christopher Kennedy, a Hagan pal, is a principal in the deal.
We can give special thanks to Hagan. The same Hagan took a private jet ride down to Columbus in the early 1990s to lobby successfully for a full tax exemption for Gateway. The tax exemption actually extends to other sports facilities throughout the state of Ohio.
Give. Give. Give. Timmy’s motto.
So all three Cleveland sports facilities – Progressive Field, Quicken Arena and Browns Stadium – are assessed no property taxes on the physical structures. They pay property taxes only on the land and in the Browns situation the city actually pays the land property taxes not the Cleveland Browns owners, the Lerner family. The taxes the city pays actually is higher than the rent the city charges Randy Lerner for near exclusive use of the stadium.
Isn’t it a bit ironic that the public pays an extra sales tax while MMPI, the recipient of the hundreds of millions of dollars of sales taxes for 20 years, gets an exemption on the sales tax for its building and construction materials.
Is there no justice at all? Are we to be suckers forever?
It’s called Corporate Justice. Courtesy of our elected politicians.
The business guys and their toadies in government never miss a chance to reward the rich and take from the rest of us.
I guess the Plain Dealer didn’t think it was important enough to give the tax breaks a more prominent play. Who’d a thought?”’
Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.
He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991.