Imagine you are a tenant in an office building, but you aren’t a good one. You pay your rent late, you cause all sorts of trouble — noise, garbage, harassing other tenants — and are generally a pain in the neck. What do you think your chances are of getting a better deal from the landlord?
None, of course — unless your landlord is the city. Because that’s exactly what the City Council did yesterday for developers Lawrence and Rita Sweeney, whose track record is exactly that. We’re giving them $12 million and cutting their taxes by a couple of million more to help them build a condo and hotel tower. You can check this link for all the crap that city has put up with from the Sweeneys; it’s too annoying for me to recap.
I realize I bellyache about this stuff a lot, but it’s not like I don’t have good reason. This deal makes no sense whatsoever. So why are we doing it? Can anyone explain that? If this keeps up, I’m tempted to put a deal together to redo a building downtown just to show that the council will give money to any bozo who comes along.
