Today's column is about the tax increment financing deal that Harford County approved for developer Clark Turner last week. Turner will turn Beechtree golf course into a neighborhood of 768 houses, and the site's future property-tax revenue will be used to secure a $14 million bond issue to help pay for roads, sewers and so forth.
But only on and immediately outside the site. Proponents of the TIF kept talking about how it would upgrade county infrastructure at a time of scarce public funding -- as if the traffic nightmare on Fallston's Route 152 or some other systemic bottleneck would be addressed. The only road improvements that will come from the deal are four intersection upgrades right near Beechtree. These are the kind of projects developers routinely have to do with their own money.
Another point: Pro-TIFers keep trying to pretend that the Beechtree taxing district will somehow be separate from Harford County. "The bonds are not an obligation of the county," they say. True, Beechtree residents, and not the county as a whole, will have to service the bonds. But Beechtree residents will be county residents as much as anybody who lives in Harford now. If somehow the project got stalled and there wasn't enough tax revenue to pay bond interest and principal, the county would probably have to come up with a bailout. In any event the TIF will divert property tax revenue that ordinarily would have gone into Harford's general fund, and that's a material impact on all county taxpayers.