Milwaukee sets July 2 hearing on Bucks arena plan, maybe will figure how much it’d cost city by then

The Wisconsin state legislature may be at a total standstill on deciding what to do about Gov. Scott Walker’s Milwaukee Bucks arena funding proposal, but Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is moving ahead, calling a public hearing for July 2 to discuss the city’s part of the plan.

How much the city would be funding has been a bit of a moving target, thanks to a pile of tax kickbacks and free land that would be involved, so maybe this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article will provide a coherent rundown of … nope, nope, do yourself a favor and don’t even try to read it. (There are a lot of numbers, but not in any way that’s easy to add up.) Here’s everything the city would be on the hook for, best as I can make out:

• $35 million for a new parking garage, to be paid off mostly with property taxes from an existing downtown tax increment financing district. ($8 million of this would be initially paid for by the Bucks, but the city would repay them with TIF funds, so it’s really all city money.)
• $12 million for a “public plaza” within the Bucks’ new entertainment space, to be repaid via a new TIF district on the team’s non-arena development (i.e., the Bucks would get to pay their property taxes and eat them too).
• An existing parking garage worth $7 million, which the city would give to the Bucks so they could tear it down and build stuff on it.

And not addressed in the J-S article:

• A full property tax break for the new arena, worth an estimated $180 million.
• More free land for sundry other things.

If there’s one thing that hearings would be good for, it would be actually getting a complete accounting of what Milwaukee taxpayers would be giving to the Bucks as part of this deal, and how much it would all be worth. I’m not holding my breath that this is going to happen — I expect more Barrett’s staff showing Powerpoints of how great it all is, Common Ground folks demanding that more funding for schools be part of the package, and lots of people dressed like this — but it’d be nice.

[UPDATE: Just noticed that Urban Milwaukee has attempted its own summary of the total city costs, though it admits that this is an “elusive task.”]