By Robert Miranda

Editor’s Commentary

There has been a lot of discussion in recent days about Mayor Barrett’s downtown streetcar proposal. In fact, the mayor showed up in Alderman Bob Donovan’s district to peddle his streetcar Kool aid.

Discussions about who will actually benefit from this city-wide taxpayer funded project, who is being overlooked and left out from participating in the planning, construction, and use of the streetcar and which neighborhoods are deliberately or in deliberately being excluded from planned extended map routes, in particular on the north and south side were brought up.

However, the most most vigorous discussion is centering around how the proposed downtown streetcar proposal will be financed, in particular whether or not Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) future revenues will be sacrificed to finance the downtown streetcar was all but ignored during the mayor’s presentation.

The heated debate regarding funding the streetcar project resulted in a retraction from the City of Milwaukee Legislative Research Bureau (LRB) of three memos that the department released in the last month, drawing attention to how much future tax property revenue would be “deterred” or “transferred” from MPS to pay for the streetcar financing. A retraction from the City of Milwaukee research department has been called highly irregular and extraordinary.

The position that Mayor Barrett’s administration, downtown Ald. Bauman and eastside Ald. Kovac has adopted that no MPS future funds will be used to finance the downtown streetcar is simply not true or factual!

Let’s begin with where the majority of the financing for the proposed streetcar is to come from, Tax Incremental Districts (TIDs) #56 and #82. TID #82 is a newly proposed district supported by Mayor Barrett, downtown Ald. Bauman, eastside Ald. Kovac and other north side alderpersons.

The #56 TID was originally created to extend the Riverwalk along the east bank of the Milwaukee River between North Broadway and the Harbor. This TID (56) has already made all of their debt obligation payments and has reimbursed all of the costs related to that project, which normally results in the TID being terminated and the property tax revenues going back to the taxing entities (MPS, MATC, MMSD, City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County).

That never occurred with #56 TID, the Common Council along with the City of Milwaukee Redevelopment Authority and the Joint Review Board amended the #56 TID to become a “donor” TID. A “donor” TID may allocate increased, or incremental, property taxes to another TID for up to 10 years.

This is one of the ways in which Mayor Barrett’s downtown streetcar is deferring money away from MPS. Those property tax revenues from TID #56 are now proposed to go to finance the streetcar, instead of going to the taxing entities, which includes MPS. THE STREETCAR IS TAKING MONEY AWAY FROM MPS BECAUSE OF THIS.

The establishment of the downtown streetcar TID is another obstacle against moving the South side community away from poverty. It becomes another impairment to MPS because TIDs that have been established in the past, by and large, have been used as “donor” TIDs to support other TIDs in the city that really doesn’t need them.

The results of these actions by the mayor, his networks and the status quo is clear. Poverty in the South side community continues to grow in areas where poverty never had a foothold in the past, thus destroying South side neighborhoods because the status quo have not allowed TIDs to terminate. By not allowing most of these TIDs to terminate, the South side community becomes the casualty of this economic policy because those revenue streams, which should be freed up to support economic policies that would address and begin the process of fighting back poverty in the South side, are now tied up again for years supporting other TIDs as “donor” TIDs for project like the streetcar.

So in essence, the mayor is taking money away from MPS and from our community, when he and the Common Council prevents TIDs from terminating and uses them to be “donor” TIDs to support projects like his choo-choo train.

The cost to the economic life of the South side community by these practices is of no concern to the city’s status quo as illustrated by the fact that Milwaukee is a leader in segregation, Black male unemployment, neighborhood deterioration and other social factors that are compounded by poverty.