Petrified of losing another business to Kansas, the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council recently awarded an organization of state insurance regulators a $1.5 million subsidy to remain at Crown Center.
The council members may not have been aware, but the National Association of Insurance Commissioners is already the indirect beneficiary of a tax break. The association leases space in a building with a reduced property tax bill.
The insurance commissioners group is an original tenant of a building that Crown Center opened in 2000. Like other Crown Center properties, 2301 McGee Street benefits from a tax break designed to encourage redevelopment in sketchy areas. (Hallmark applied for the original tax break for Crown Center in 1967.)
The tax break freezes property taxes for 10 years. Then, for the next 15 years, the owner pays taxes on half the value of the land and buildings.
The county says the eight-story building that the insurance commissioners use is worth $24.6 million. The Crown Power Redevelopment Corporation paid $369,648 in taxes on the building in 2009, the first year the 15-year rate went into effect. In 2008, Crown Power paid only $33,265 in taxes.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners can't deposit Crown Center's tax break in the bank and use it to buy booze for the Christmas party. Still, an incentive that reduces a landlord's cost of business should benefit a tenant as well, in the form of lower rents.
I don't know what the insurance association's lease looks like. But the $1.5 million subsidy from the city suggests the people who run it have talent for negotiation.
Showing 1-3 of 3
Booze for the Christmas party? The NAIC has not had a Christmas party in years, and when it did it was a cash bar.
In your piece, you start a sentence with "the council may not be aware", which pretty well sums up lots of things that go on in KCMO. And what, exactly, did Crown Center "give" this organizations to try to get them to renew their lease?
This opens the floodgates to use the earnings tax as the latest giveaway at exactly the time city officials are trying to scare voters into voting against its repeal. So the campaign slogan is, we can give it away, but you can't take it away?
Not very convincing!
like
dislike
