November 11, 2004
Lion lays with lamb; film at 11
Okay, now this is just getting plain screwy. One day after D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and council chair Linda Cropp were at each other's rhetorical throats over their competing Expos stadium proposals, the two appeared on the verge of a deal yesterday, with Cropp saying she'd support the mayor's bill so long as it included the possibility of substituting some private financing in the future, while Williams said of his recent nemesis: "I think Linda is in good faith looking for ways to limit the District's financial exposure in this project, and ... I fully endorse that." A vote on a re-revised stadium bill could now come as early as next week.
The key to Cropp's private-financing plan appears to be a tax shelter similar to those known as LILOs (lease-in, lease-out) and SILOs (sale-in, lease-out), in which local governments effectively sell the depreciation rights of public assets to private companies. (Governments can't take advantage of depreciation because they don't pay taxes.) These have been among the more infamous tax loopholes of recent years - in one instance, a company got a tax break for leasing streetcars in a town in Germany - and Congress has eliminated many of them over the past year or so. Cropp's plan might yet remain legal, however, as the private developer would be leasing the stadium to the team, not directly back to the city.
In any case, it's important to recognize that using depreciation would still be a public subsidy of another kind. As Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice said to me yesterday: "Instead of sending a bill to D.C. taxpayers, they'd be sending a bill to federal taxpayers."
Posted by: psikeyhackr at June 26, 2005 10:43 AM
