by Jon Baliles
On Wednesday afternoon at 3:00pm in City Council chambers, City Council will vote and approve the plan presented by the Mayor and Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) to allow Richmond to issue $170 million in bonds to pay for the new baseball stadium on ten acres that will be surrounded by about 57 acres of new development built out over the next decade plus.
Two years after kicking off the Diamond District process, the new plan announced a month ago was suddenly hailed as the fastest way to build a new stadium so Major League Baseball (MLB) doesn’t move the franchise for failing to upgrade stadium facilities as promised since The Diamond is too archaic to be retrofitted or modernized.
Wednesday will be a rosy “kumbayah” meeting in which all the positives will be laid out in front of the Council and the public and none of the negatives or risks will be discussed. The public hearing will take place, but many people will be at work in the afternoon or picking kids up from school, and others might decide to stay home knowing this deal will be approved by Council on a 9-0 (or maybe an 8-1) vote.
The city’s “leaders” and financial experts promise this new plan will save millions over the next three decades because of lower interest rates and “almost no risk,” compared to the original plan they started out with two years ago. But the Mayor and CAO, in their desperation to get any deal done and not lose a second baseball franchise, forgot to put any protections in the deal for the city and managed to leave a trap door.
They swear up and down that the development that has been occurring organically in and around Ashe Boulevard and Scott’s Addition will continue (which is very probable), and that the new development in the Diamond District will produce enough new tax revenue to cover, or almost cover, the annual debt required to pay the bonds back (or so we are told).
But what no one will talk about on Wednesday is the trap door in the form of a blank check called the Community Development Authority (CDA) that will have a real impact on future city budgets and city services for decades to come. Two years ago when the Diamond District was announced, the plan was to create a CDA to issue bonds for the stadium that would be paid back by tax revenue from the development within the district’s boundaries. Continue reading