In 2002 the Board of Trustees created the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) to improve the Whitmore Lake business district. The other reasons it was created are outlined on pages 6-7 of this document, a document created a year later to define the DDA's Tax Increment Financing authority. You can read the document online at the above link or download a copy from the township website here.
The DDA is an unelected body, a special interest group unaccountable to the taxpayers from whom, by the DDA's own optimistic spreadsheet projections (p.18, pp.23-30), it would eventually have captured and spent $58 million in tax receipts.
Their plan seems innocent enough. Improve the downtown, right? The problem is that they planned to do very little downtown. $125,000 in grants for downtown business facade renovation vs. $15,000,000 in new utilities and $28,000,000 for a bridge far south of downtown. Lip service to the downtown parking problem, which won't be solved by anything but cruel decisions, eminent domain, and bulldozers. $500,000 for a streetscape program comprising plantings, street furniture, and decorator streetlighting. Which sounds attractive but will result in even less parking space, unless, again, that funding is also diverted to the south, where there is no pesky downtown to get in the way.
The DDA is an unelected body, a special interest group unaccountable to the taxpayers from whom, by the DDA's own optimistic spreadsheet projections (p.18, pp.23-28), it would eventually have captured and spent $58 million in tax receipts. In addition to taxes destined for the County and Township general funds, these receipts include township police, fire, and medical rescue millages. Apparently burdening our police and fire department budgets with the bloated public safety building debt wasn't enough for the 2003 Board of Trustees. According to the DDA's 2003 projections (p.23), by 2014 the DDA would have been "capturing" almost $500,000 per year from police, medical rescue, and fire millages. Who would have made up the shortfall? You and me.
Appendix 7 to this document, (pp. 61-63), describes the infamous North Territorial/US-23 Overpass and the DDA scheme to pay for replacing it using the bankster magic of Tax Increment Financing (TIF). "5 Lanes Minimum" is the original spec, (p58). At the time I saw a blueprint showing 6 or 7 lanes. Including interest over the life of the debt, the total cost of the bridge was estimated at $28 Million, (p.14.)
On page 53 is a rather bizarre map of the DDA district. It's not even close to the DDA's legal description on page 34. Even so, the Township's map of the DDA is even vaguer, showing without any legend or description a disjoint set of parcels, scattered like the broken toys of a petulant child.
Why would you entrust $58,000,000 to people who can't even keep their maps straight?
Map on the township website. Is this the real DDA district?
Or is this the real DDA, a map drawn with MapWashtenaw GIS using the page 34 DDA Legal Description? (In the area around the Links Golf Course, the area denoted by ????, the ambiguity in the Legal Description made accurate mapping impossible.)
