Harbor Point set to get $100,000 credit for work the city will do
INSIDE CITY HALL: A fresh subsidy for Michael Beatty that’s mighty hard to trace
Above: The Central Avenue Bridge will span the waterway between Harbor Point and Harbor East, seen at center of this picture.
Before tomorrow’s Board of Estimates is a $98,000 credit to the developer of Harbor Point for work that the city, not the developer, will do.
The credit is not made explicit in the BOE agenda; in fact, you have to do the math yourself (using percentages buried in the text) to arrive at the figure.
Here’s how it works: An original fee of $500,000 owed by the Beatty Development Group to pay for traffic mitigation improvements will be reduced to slightly over $400,000 thanks to a “credit” to the developer for building the Central Avenue Bridge.
The rub is that the Beatty organization is no longer building the bridge – the City of Baltimore is.
And just two months ago, the Rawlings-Blake administration kindly stepped forward to absorb any cost overruns on the same bridge in yet another agreement with the Beatty organization.
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UPDATE: The item, on the spending board’s routine agenda, was unanimously approved today by Comptroller Joan M. Pratt, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young and the other two members.
Asked by The Brew to explain why Beatty still was receiving the credit, the mayor said “I don’t have an answer for you” and referred a reporter to her staff, who in turn referred The Brew to Department of Transportation officials. (These are the officials queried by The Brew yesterday who have still not made a substantive reply.)
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Follow the Fine Print
Back to the matter at hand: When the traffic mitigation arrangement was originally signed, the developer was expected to build the Central Avenue Bridge out of TIF (tax incentive) funds advanced by the city.
Since then, the city decided to take over construction of the bridge, while handing $106 million to Beatty to construct the rest of the site’s public infrastructure, including streets, sanitation lines, parks and a waterfront promenade.
Harbor Point developer Michael Beatty at a press conference last year. (Photo by Mark Reutter)
Tomorrow’s BOE meeting is expected to formally approve the “Public Infrastructure Developer’s Agreement No. 1328” with Beatty.
A 2011 city ordinance requires developers of large projects to share the costs of roadway improvements needed to handle traffic generated by the projects.
The fee is largely based on the square footage of the proposed development.
Source: Further Beatty Subsidy
In tomorrow’s agreement, the city agrees to reduce the original $500,000 fee by means of a 18.2% credit for the bridge and a 1.8% credit for transit piers.
“The city is giving money back for what the city is actually doing,” said a source with knowledge of the agreement, adding, “It’s a further subsidy to a heavily subsidized development.”
When we called him today, Beatty said he was at a meeting and could not talk. He has not returned the call to discuss the fee arrangement.
City DOT has not yet responded to our emailed request for comment on the bridge credit.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Khalil Zaied, former director of DOT who is now a top Rawlings-Blake aide, successfully pushed for the traffic ordinance back in 2011.
Zaied said the new law was needed to make “the current traffic mitigation process more transparent and predictable.”