Making public business private

TIRZ plan questionable

By Greg Rohloff
Business Correspondent

A proposed plan for a new entity to oversee the next phase of downtown redevelopment has raised questions about transparency and public accountability.

Photo by Ralph Duke TIRZ Talk: Members of the Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone Board discuss a proposed reorganization of Center City of Amarillo Fund Inc. to establish a private corporation to hire a director and oversee downtown development.

Those concerns came after Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone Board President Richard Brown gave a veiled explanation Jan. 10 at a TIRZ Board meeting of how a new board would oversee the next steps of downtown Amarillo redevelopment.

The plan would convert the Center City of Amarillo Fund Inc. into a new private entity with its own executive charged with deal making and not directly tied to the current Center City board.

Center City board member John Skaggs had invited Brown, who drafted the proposal for a successor board to the downtown task force, to attend the meeting of the Center City board today (Jan. 17) to hear how Center City feels about the matter.

The presentation at the TIRZ board meeting was in vague language.

If members from the Center City Development Committee come to the Center City board meeting to defend the proposal, they will likely hear how the plan seems needlessly convoluted and lacks public oversight in a way that smacks of the new position's being just another way of pumping money and authority into Amarillo's so-called good-old-boys network.

To be certain, Brown's interests in rejuvenating downtown stretch far beyond any such simplistic explanations of "what might be" once the current downtown task force goes out of existence in March. Brown has devoted countless hours to improving downtown before downtown was cool.

Brown explained that the proposal was preliminary and likely to see much revision before it reached a vote.

To expedite the matter, Brown suggested board members circulate their comments among themselves, causing City Attorney Marcus Norris to raise a red flag. Discussing the matter over the phone or by e-mail would violate the state's Open Meetings Act. To this Brown suggested that not all of the board members would want to comment, a number participating that might be exempt from open-meetings requirements.

To that, Norris chuckled and pointed out that any board that purposely circumvents the law by carrying out private discussions of public business in groups less than a quorum also violates the law.

On Monday, Norris pointed out that business people aren't as accustomed to openness as are public officials.

"It was a brainstorming session," he said of the meeting, adding that business people see the process in terms of efficiency.

Brown never said who drafted the proposal, but pressed after the meeting, ducked a straight answer twice. He then acknowledged he was the principal author, even though the nine-page document was submitted under the name of Les Simpson, publisher of the local daily newspaper owned by out-of-state corporate interests, and the new president of the downtown task force.

Brown's reasoning for the task force successor board to be a private one focused on dealing with real estate developers and their projects for downtown: "This is the private sector."

The director of this operation would be paid through the TIRZ board, the city of Amarillo and Center City of Amarillo, which receives part of its funding from the city budget.

Brown argued that Center City's focus has been the annual downtown block party, other similar promotional and fundraising events, and the administration of a grant program for helping downtown businesses improve their streetscapes and storefronts. As such, he said, Center City lacks experience in dealing with high-powered developers who come to Amarillo looking to invest in real estate with its lower land and property costs than in larger metropolitan areas.

The proposed board would include as ex officio members the presidents of the downtown task force, the TIRZ board and Center City, and the planning director for the city's Planning Department, Brown said.

These members would appoint a six-member board that would oversee downtown development, and would include property owners and others who are large stakeholders in downtown.

And while that would seem like a simple plan, developer Todd Harmon, who is redeveloping the Barfield Building, pointed out that it could simply be another level of bureaucracy that would slow development.

Harmon was attending the TIRZ meeting to ask about the progress of the board's first official act — the approval of a property tax rebate for the Barfield Building as part of the TIRZ funding process in November.

All that Harmon needed was the signature on the document from Brown, still not forthcoming some five weeks after the approval of the TIRZ board.

"It was simply (that) we ran out of time," said Vicki Covey, the city of Amarillo's director of community services. "We're not at the execution stage."

Finalizing the contract and having Brown and Norris agree on the language was slowed by the Christmas-New Year's holidays. The city doesn't have a model for this kind of deal because it's the first one, she said.

Others involved in downtown development weren't so anxious to have their names attached to criticism of the proposal, noting its preliminary stage. But they agreed that a private board, with no oversight from the City Commission or any other public body, could quickly produce a situation where board members could pose the what's-in-it-for-us questions to out-of-town developers before granting their blessing on proposals; hardly the united spirit sought when the downtown task force set out in its beginnings that downtown was truly a neighborhood for everyone in Amarillo, not just the moneyed operators.

— George Schwarz contributed to this story.

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Posted: January 17, 2008