(Have the tax dollars raised by the creation of the 4A sales tax been spent as voters were told they would be? You be the judge. The following is re-posted from March 28, 2010.)
ED Wayback Machine, Part III: We will use this money to diversify the economy. Except when we don't.
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In the archives are many, many letters just like this one. Too many to count. All with the same drumbeat: Midland is too tied to an oil-based economy and we need this money from the taxpayer so that we can go out and recruit businesses for Midland who are not part of the oil-based economy. That way we are protected from the downside of business cycles that inevitably come and go.
Actually, it goes a much further than that. The business cycles are usually a result of the market demand (and therefore price) of oil. When the price of oil is high, Midland thrives. When the price of oil is low, Midland suffers a bit. But these cycles are just that. Cycles.
There were also many letters like this one:
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One of the biggest arguments offered by the campaign for an Economic Development Sales Tax and its supporters was not simply that we needed to protect ourselves from these business cycles but that the oil reserves on which our economy was based were simply going away. The author of one letter compared Midland to a mining town and stated that he was not aware of a town based solely on mining that survived.
But over the life of the MDC, it has given a lot of money away to companies that 1) are already here, 2) are already coming here without any MDC-driven public subsidies, 3) operate in the oil-based economy, 4) are currently in default (or about to be) on the terms of their agreement with the MDC, or 5) are all of the above. (In fact, here is a challenge: List the companies that the MDC has "incented" that don't fit into one of the above categories.)
Every dollar that the Midland Development Corporation extracts from the economy and turns over to these companies in the oil business like Basic Energy and now the global multi-billion dollar Apache Corporation reveals fully half of the reasoning behind the need for an ED sales tax to be an outright falsehood. I'd call it an outright lie but for the fact that it is a Sunday morning so I feel the need to be more civil. And also because, at the time, the authors of these letters probably really believed what they wrote about what the purpose of this tax money was and how it was to be used.
We have said before that the local economic development establishment behaves and operates as though economic development is whatever the hell they say it is on any given day. Ten years ago the oil patch was going away. Apache Corporation quite apparently disagrees and has decided (with zero artificial incentives needed) to set up a regional office here to handle the acquisitions they have made in the area over the past several years. Still, the local development corporation finds it necessary to hand over a quarter of a million dollars of public money to Apache Corporation to....to do what, exactly? Just spend it locally somewhere?
That kind of sounds like...um..."Stimulus Money"...if you know what I mean.
Go back and read the campaign literature...or wait for it to show up here. It doesn't take much reading to realize that the Midland Development Corporation, along with the City Council, has essentially re-purposed the money that they asked the public for back on November 6, 2001. Yes, I know that "The Law" allows the MDC to spend the money on these things, just as the law allows a panhandler on the street to buy a bottle of vodka with the money he asked you for just so he could get a hot meal.
I would like to think that there is at least one member of the City Council...or even more than one member who would take an honest look at the money that has been taken out of the economy in the last ten years and, taking into consideration the original claims of what the money was for and to whom it would go, and then compare that to what is obviously now a manifest change in philosophy (not to mention the spectacular lack of any success) and then wonder if, just perhaps, the voters should be consulted again.
But then, that's just crazy talk. Because what has happened to this money is what happens to almost all government-run "Investment in our Future!" programs. At the beginning, it was money that was to be used for a specific purpose from which specific results would be achieved.
Ten years on, the money has been re-purposed; there are no discernable results, and what was once asked for from the public is now seen as an entitlement by local public officials both elected and unelected. Among the incenteratti, immediately upon the failure of Plan A there will always be a Plan B (or C or D...), or the need for "improved communications", or the hiring of more consultants to point out Airpark on a map and call it an "Opportunity Zone" or some damned thing to justify the money they take and to help explain away their lack of (positive) impact.
The idea that this money is better left in the hands of the taxpayers never survives. Because, you see, in the eyes of Official Midland, it's their money now. Not yours.
(Originally posted by Walsingham on March 28, 2010)