When you help expose the abuses of a local tax mechanism are you obligated to never use it for yourself? If Tax Increment Financing is just a tool, like a hammer, does a principled critic of dumb hammer users imply the hammer itself should never be used by the critic? And, with all the people now using this metaphorical hammer, wouldn’t the behavior of someone who developed hammer-using policies be a little more newsworthy than a single project?
These are just SOME of the questions I had bouncing around in my noggin after reading not ONE article about Adam Hertz using Tax Increment Financing, but TWO whole articles, one from the Missoulian’s David Erickson, and the other from Martin “Gomer” Kidston, the former Montana Democrat spokesperson who now pretends he’s a news reporter.
While Marty didn’t expose his real reason for highlighting Hertz’s use of TIF by throwing shade on his past criticism, Davey definitely DID. Here’s the reason the article was written by the Missoulian:
Hertz, a former member of Missoula City Council and a former state lawmaker, was often vocally critical of certain aspects of Tax Increment Financing when he was on council. One argument he often made was disputing the city’s position that lots of development wouldn’t have happened in the city’s Urban Renewal District’s without TIF.
Hertz, in the past, has argued that the Stockman Bank building in downtown Missoula and expansions at Southgate Mall would have happened anyway, and those projects didn’t need to be incentivized with TIF funds.
“The problem is I don’t believe TIF was necessary to make those things happen,” Hertz said in a debate with former mayor John Engen in 2020. “It’s a big subsidy that takes money from schools and government in order to subsidize a development that would have existed anyway. They got what I consider a corporate handout.”
When you take TIF there’s an unspoken expectation: if you don’t like how the piggy bank gets passed around like a sorority girl at a frat house, shut your fucking face about it. When businesses like Bretz RV broke this unspoken rule, and tried to do something about it, politically, they got PLENTY of media scrutiny, which my article from April of 2023 documented at the time.
Here’s a portion of the Missoulian article that hammered businesses for funding a political mailer supporting candidates who did NOT support the piggy bank politics of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, or Missoula’s shadow government, which is how I refer to MRA and its function in this town.
Some funders of a divisive political mailer supporting Missoula City Council candidates opposed to the use of tax increment financing have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in TIF funds for their business projects.
The group, a political action committee, or PAC, called Missoulians for Missoula, sent campaign mailers Monday supporting conservative candidates who have all voiced opposition to tax increment financing.
The mailer at the time was seen as an unusual move in a municipal election, which Lee Banville explained later in the article.
Lee Banville, author of “Covering American Politics in the 21st Century: An Encyclopedia of News Media Titans, Trends, and Controversies” and a University of Montana journalism professor, said these types of divisive mailers are rare in municipal elections.
“We haven’t really seen this going on in city elections in Montana. If you go to a bigger place, the higher the stakes or the bigger the election, the more money in the elections, you’ll see more outside groups come in, but this is pretty unusual for a city election of this size,” Banville said.
“More now, people aren’t saying, ‘I disagree with you on a policy,’ it’s more, ‘I don’t like you,’ he said. “The politics have become more strident, and the fact that it gets down into your city ward races is pretty striking.”
Sorry, Lee, but I don’t think it’s a matter of who is liked and who is disliked, unless you’re talking about the media hating conservatives, because THAT is what I’m seeing in the scrutiny directed at Adam Hertz for ONE project, while Ellie Boldman continues to enjoy media scarcity as she commits crimes (DUI conviction) and resigns from ANOTHER non-profit director job.
Thanks to the media’s framing of Tax Increment Financing as a GOOD liberal tax policy despised by conservatives, the deployment of this skim-and-give taxing tool is spreading to other Montana communities. From the link:
Downtown Great Falls is a gem, said Planning and Community Development Director Brock Cherry last week. It’s one of the elements that persuaded him to move to the area years ago.
Cherry led a meeting in the Civic Center to discuss a draft program to help fund housing development downtown using tax increment financing (TIF). The target of this funding would be so-called “workforce housing,” which is aimed at lower-middle-income families that make 60% to 140% of the area median income. For a single person, that is about $39,000 to $91,000 per year, according to one measure of area income. That figure increases for dual-income households.
The same demographic could also be called “missing middle,” a term that NeighborWorks Great Falls Director Sherrie Arey used last year when describing a new loan program for prospective home buyers. It’s all part of a broader effort to increase the housing supply in Great Falls.
What’s next for Great Falls? Maybe they should try “land-banking”, an amazing method of spending other people’s money (tax payers) to over-pay for a piece of property (former Sleepy Inn on West Broadway) and then use MORE money to destroy the existing housing structure in order to provide housing for WEEDS, which is all that’s growing right now where poor people once lived for $250 bucks a week.
Another idea is to build TALLER, something State Senator, Ellie Boldman, worked on enabling during this past session. To champion this legislation Ellie’s Democrat pal, Danny Tenenbaum, made it sound like a REVOLUTION was happening in Montana in an article he wrote all by himself for something called the “Sightline Institute“.
Something big is brewing in Big Sky Country: an ongoing bipartisan revolution in housing policy.
In 2023 Montana passed an ambitious package of land use reforms, making it easier for the state to meet its growing demand for housing. This year the legislature’s cross-partisan pro-housing caucus kept its foot on the gas and passed an even more ambitious package of changes to the rules that have contributed to the state’s housing shortage.
The most significant reforms won’t take effect until 2026, but other states would do well to study Montana’s strategy for success.
Yep, Danny Tenenbaum is so politically delusional he thinks the rest of America should emulate the dumpster fire that emerged in Helena this spring, making Montana’s tax policies some of the most complicated in the country. I guess that’s what you get when elect a New York transplant who once got paid by Homeland Security to work with refugees overseas, a little detail I got from Danny’s Wikipedia page:
After earning his bachelor’s degree, Tenenbaum worked as an overseas refugee officer with the Department of Homeland Security. After graduating from law school, he and his wife moved from New York City to Missoula, Montana, where he works as a public defender.
I’m glad I didn’t get this New Yorker as MY public defender after the city allowed an ex to weaponize a restraining order against me so that I’m no longer allowed at City Council, nor able to write about our local chapter of the United Way. I’m also glad local prosecutors decided to NOT take my complain against Tenenbaum seriously after he snuck into Crosspoint Church to secretly record Christians having a meeting.
Imagine what would happen if I snuck into Danny’s synagogue to record all the joy and celebrating that must be happening now that the Zionists have their Holy War to play with. Does anyone think I could pull that off WITHOUT being arrested?
So, in conclusion, the two articles about Adam Hertz using TIF money comes from a liberal media landscape that uses its power to selectively scrutinize conservatives while giving a GIANT pass to Democrats who are doing MUCH MORE damaging things to our community than using a commonly used financial tool to build some much-needed housing.
Pathetic.
Thanks for reading!
