Mesa del Sprawl

Andrew Web sure throws the words sprawl and planning around in this Albuquerque Journal story about Mesa del Sol and tax increment financing.  In fact, he calls Mesa del Sol a sprawling Master Planned Community in the first paragraph.  And those two things are supposed to be contradictory.

Then he makes this statement:

In other projects, especially on the city's West Side, developers have generally paid for residential streets, while the city has primarily used impact fees paid by those developers to build major roads, sewer lines and the like.

  So now we're gonna make it sound like Mesa del Sol is getting a radical special subsidy?    And on the West Side, developers and impact fees paid for all that stuff?  Come ON!

What about the other 30 or 40 years of tax-paid infrastructure investment on the West Side?   What about the river crossings at Alameda, Paseo del Norte and Montano?  Freeway interchanges at Coors, Unser and Paseo del Vulcan?   Extension of Paseo and Unser through the escarpment?  That water and sewer line extension all the way out to Double Eagle and the mattress factory? 

Developers have generally paid....  somebody maybe, but not for West Side growth.    

Comments

[John Fleck]

Coco -

Thanks, but you're being too rhetorical for your own good here - meaning - I don't know the answers to your rhetorical questions, about who paid for what West Side infrastructure, when and how. I'm trying to understand how this TIF thing fits into what we've done before. Help me out.

[Coco]

John!

The State and the Feds paid for most of the big-scale scale improvements - along with City taxpayers. Those weren't funded with impact fees, which are less than ten years old. And certainly not funded by developers - who previously would contribute to infrastructure through negotiated development agreements.

We've been paying for construction of necessary West side infrastructure (infrastructure like Mesa del Sol needs) as a City, County, State and Federal government since before the 70's. Like everywhere else.

When a semi-innovative idea comes up for funding MDS from the tax revenue it generates, NOW we're told we should worry about fairess and aging infrastructure? (That was PGS.) Senator Joe Carraro even makes the statement about funding West Side classrooms.

Forget rhetoric, do you get the irony?

[John Fleck]

Thanks, yes, that answers my question(s), and I do grasp the irony.