CITY STONEWALLS BOARDWALK DISCLOSURE

Two weeks ago one of our intrepid readers did a little digging into our tongue-in-cheek solution to the City's budget crisis.  We had discovered that the developers of the Boardwalk project (the renovated Berkey & Gay furniture factory on Monroe Avenue) had submitted a building permit application stating that they were adding $150 million in value to the project.  That sum was clearly at odds with the subsequent tax assessment of the project at about one-tenth of that amount -- and so we slyly suggested that the City could raise new tax revenues by adjusting the assessment to the amount the developers had claimed to put into it.

Of course, we suspected the $150 million entry was a mistake.  Nevertheless, one of our reader pursued the matter with City Manager Kurt Kimball, who responded that the Boardwalk developers filed a statement with the City that they had invested only $20 million into the project and so accords with the $19 million tax assessment of the property.

We thank our reader for this information, because it is very interesting.  The Boardwalk developers' stated figure of $20 million is at odds with an earlier written statement they had made, through their spokesman Thomas Beckering, that they had invested $31.5 million in the redevelopment of the Berkey & Gay factory into the Boardwalk.  It is also at odds with the amount the developers would have had to report to their bankers to get $26.5 million in loans against the project.  (Federally-insured banks are limited to lending 75% of the value of commercial property.)  Therefore, it looks like the Boardwalk developers had understated to the City the amount they put into the project to get an improperly reduced tax assessment.

To confirm this, on May 5th I sent the City Attorney's office a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of the Boardwalk developers' letter recording the $20 million figure.  Late last week Assistant City Attorney Daniel Ophoff responded.  You may recall that Ophoff is the fellow who destroyed City records to prevent them from being disclosed under one of our FOIA requests.  This time instead of destroying the requested document Ophoff denied its disclosure to me by claiming that he did not have to because of ongoing litigation between me and the City.

Michigan's FOIA law does permit this basis for denial, and there is a lawsuit against the City in which I am a plaintiff pending before Judge Redford in Kent County Circuit Court.  This is the hazardous waste dumping complaint.  While the suit does cite the Boardwalk (a.k.a. "Toxic Towers") as the source of the contaminated soil its developers dumped at the Monroe Avenue water filtration plant, the lawsuit obviously has nothing to do with the Boardwalk's tax assessment.  So, Ophoff is improperly using the hazardous waste suit as an excuse to obstruct my request for the developers' statement.  Once again, we have the City Attorney's office protecting the Boardwalk developers to the apparent detriment of taxpayers and residents.