Tea Party member spars with Charles Landry over TIFs

Joyce Linde, coordinator with the Tea Party of Lafayette, says tax increment financing districts often distort the free market and impose taxes without public votes. Linde debated real estate attorney Charles Landry about the merits of TIFs at the 2011 Smart Growth Summit at the Shaw Center today. Tea Party advocates have derailed multiple TIFs in Lafayette. Linde says TIFs often amount to unnecessary corporate welfare. “If a project has value, it will pay for itself,” she said. Linde observed that proposed districts in Lafayette would have imposed higher sales taxes at a time when people could least afford them, and dismissed Landry’s argument that someone could always avoid such taxes by shopping elsewhere. “If all the TIFs got through, we would have had to do a lot of driving,” she said. She also acknowledged that some TIFs, such as one that created a shopping center with a Target in a low-income area, serve a useful purpose. Landry said conservatives should consider supporting TIFs, since the districts impose accountability by dedicating existing taxes for specific economic development purposes, rather than sending that money into a general fund. TIFs only dedicate new tax revenue that wouldn’t otherwise exist, he said, so they don’t negatively impact a community’s tax base. “The city is always held harmless,” he said. He agreed with Linde that TIFs have the potential to be abused, and said they should only be used in the case of a useful project that would not happen otherwise. —David Jacobs