CRIZ and City get even crazier!

By Robert E. Field, Publlsher and Investor Builder

LNP article “Local officials seeking explanation from state for low CRIZ revenues” segues into recent inanities emanating from Lancaster City Hall.

They are two fold when it comes to CRIZ, which stands for Lancaster’s City Revitalization and Improvement Zone program.

First, it isn’t enough that the City through RACL (Redevelopment Agency for the City of Lancaster) already owns the Marriott Hotel which is leased to Penn Square Partners with the partners having the right to walk away from the lease at any time without significant, if any, consequences. So the City taxpayers are already on the hook for all the debt and Mayor Rick Gray may yet become a hotelier. Unlikely to occur? What happens with the Marriott if the money hemorrhaging and now aging Convention Center has to shut down?

But now Gray wants to have the taxpayers guarantee debt of the Lancaster Hotel (formerly flagged as Hilton, Ramada, and Brunswick.) Gray seeks to create major competition for the City owned Marriott! If the former Hilton is properly restored, it could take away a huge portion of the Marriott’s business, Convention Center closing or not.

Second, in reference to the CRIZ donation to the owners of the Lancaster Hotel, Gray is quoted as saying: “I think at this point the city would have to look seriously at guaranteeing the bonds.”

(Owners of the hotel don’t pay back the loan; it is paid back presumably by future taxpayer money theoretically generated by an increase in tax revenue from the downtown zone. CRIZ money is an outright gift from our children to today’s business men.)

But wait a second. According to the CRIZ statute, the City already is the guarantor of payment of all delinquent CRIZ debt.

So what Gray is simply bringing into the open is what has not been talked about, except here at NewsLanc. The City will guarantee the CRIZ bonds because it already has guaranteed repayment of the debt!

Gray is not a bad guy and probably has done some good things for the City of which we have not followed. But when it comes to real estate planning and development, he and his henchman Randy Patterson are two of the biggest dunces this county has ever encountered.

The have been wrong on the Convention Center, wrong on the near Streetcar debacle, wrong on the Lancaster Square East, wrong on the Bulova Building, wrong on how to deal with the Department of Environmental Protection Agency concerning the storm / sanitary sewer run off problems, wrong, wrong, wrong on just about every thing they touch.

And future City taxpayers will suffer the consequences of high debt and lack of taxable real estate due to their twin incompetencies.