The story topping our charts this week at OakPark.com — controversy over a TIF request from a downtown developer trying to lock in a major restaurant — isn’t about shady developers or naïve public officials.
I’d say it is about the public and its tax dollars being taken for granted by a village government and its agencies, which, in this instance, has tipped too far toward business-friendly while ignoring the imperative to make its case publicly when spending our money.
This is a moment for a course correction in the worthy effort to speed development efforts in a village where previously insane approval processes and a handful of know-nothing haranguers had ground forward progress toward zero.
I sure don’t want to go back to that. But Oak Park deserves better than the misleading and too-quick effort to route $100,000 in Downtown TIF funds to the developer of the Vantage high-rise at Forest and Lake.
Here’s some background: From the start of this project — and the start goes back nearly a decade now — it has been planned that the first floor of the apartment high-rise, with about 12,000 square feet, would be retail or restaurant. The second floor was once discussed as retail, but in recent years it has been assumed that a large hospital system would build out medical offices there.
In the current market, retail has been next to impossible while restaurants fill most every vacancy in town. And so for months now it had been strongly rumored that Cooper’s Hawk, a very large restaurant format with a push on its own label of wines, was negotiating to lease the entire first floor of Vantage.
Three things: Seems Cooper’s Hawk really wanted its name kept quiet. Turns out retrofitting even a brand new building to accommodate a huge restaurant costs plenty. And those in the know all saw this entity as a major player that would spin off tons of sales tax, liquor tax and property tax.
Here’s the problem. If Vantage and Cooper’s Hawk wanted to privately negotiate their deal for another six months, that would have been fine. If either party wanted to make further concessions to the other to pay for grease traps and complicated ventilation, that would have been fine. But at some point several months back, Vantage asked the Oak Park Economic Development Corporation (OPEDC) to have the village chip in $100K to smooth the lease deal.
Seems that, months ago, after negotiating the “ask” down to that amount, OPEDC assured Vantage and assumed the village board would be OK with that gift. But with Cooper’s Hawk’s penchant for silence and the complicated nature of the lease talks, the deal didn’t surface at the public space of the village board until last week. And when it did, there were inconsistencies in explaining why the money was necessary.
The scant supporting documentation from OPEDC said the TIF funds were essential to finalizing the Cooper’s Hawk lease. Trouble is, all sides now agree, the fundamental lease agreement had been signed a week earlier.
In Oak Park, and just about everywhere TIFs exist, the public is TIF-weary and suspicious. And Oak Park does not have a good history of transparency on where TIF funds have gone over two decades.
Now officials are saying this deal isn’t done, that a full-blown discussion will take place and hard questions will be asked when the issue comes back to the board in September.
I could be persuaded to give Vantage the $100,000, or at least to advance it to them. Overall, Vantage has been a fine partner on a project that has run far closer to a market-rate deal than a trio of other projects in our downtown area — Whiteco, the former Colt site, and Harlem and South.
But, OPEDC, be straightforward. Make the case. In advance.
There is a tough intersection between private deals and public money. And this time the village and OPEDC were not respectful enough of taxpayers.
