Former Michigan State Rep. Rashida Tlaib has never seen residents as engaged as when they are pushing city leaders to pass policies around community benefit agreements, or CBAs – “not even for a candidate,” she said. These agreements are basically contract provisions that would require developers to give back to the communities surrounding their real estate projects if the developers are seeking tax incentives. Advocates of CBAs often say that the most important ingredient of a successful agreement is that community members have a heavy hand in drafting and enforcing them.
Attaching CBAs to development deals was a call that arose during this last mayoral campaign and was particularly attractive to progressive voters.
Recently, Tlaib worked with Detroit residents to get a proposition on the ballot that would establish a city ordinance for CBAs. The Rise Together Detroit coalition’s proposition ultimately failed – and we’ll get to why in a minute. However, a different CBA ordinance did pass in November, making Detroit the first city in the nation to establish such a sweeping CBA policy for citywide development. Tlaib, who is now the director of community partnerships and development at the Sugar Law Center of Economic and Social Justice, has since worked with other cities on establishing CBA ordinances.
On Thursday, June 1, Tlaib will visit St. Louis to speak about their efforts in Detroit, as well as review two different board bills that St. Louis has in the pipeline for CBA ordinances. On May 5, Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed introduced Board Bill 11 to establish a CBA policy for development contracts that receive Tax Increment Financing (TIFs) and “sales tax rebates.” But Alderwoman Megan Ellyia Green, who represents the 15th Ward, has been working on a CBA bill since last year. Green has had a draft of her legislation since January, and she planned on introducing her bill in the fall – after getting more input from stakeholders and the community.
Tlaib said she will look at both bills and offer insight on June 1 at the free public event, “What are Community Benefit Agreements?” It will be held from 6-8 p.m. at the LaSalle School, 1106 N. Jefferson Ave., and is sponsored by the St. Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance, Forward Through Ferguson and Team TIF. Several local community activists who have been working on establishing CBA policies in St. Louis will also speak.
Often when a large-scale development project establishes itself in a neighborhood, Tlaib said, “it’s treated like an island, even though there is not water around it.” City leaders throw all kinds of incentives at these developers – bonding options, tremendous amounts of public dollars – in hopes that the development will decrease poverty and increase home values and public safety, she said.
“Many times we see that doesn’t happen,” she said. “They make their money and leave. We’ve seen that over and over in Detroit. We don’t want to see that happen in St. Louis.”
St. Louis’ current situation reminds her an awful lot of Detroit’s story, she said. In 2014, a coalition of neighborhood block groups, faith groups, environmentalists, transit advocates and others met with two Detroit council members to put together a CBA ordinance.
“They did what they were supposed to do,” Tlaib said. “If you want to make change through an ordinance, you go to the decision makers.”
The two council members worked with the Sugar Law Center and developed a good bill. Council President Brenda Jones introduced the legislation in 2014, but then hearings for the bill were repeatedly cancelled. After the sixth cancellation, Tlaib said coalition members realized that they were being ignored and opponents were trying to “tire them out.” Jones’ ordinance has never come up for a vote before the full council.
Instead of standing down, the coalition raised enough money and signatures to get a proposition on the November 2016 ballot. It was called Proposal A. That’s when Councilman Scott Benson led a campaign – backed by developers, the mayor, chamber of commerce and several unions – to put a competing CBA ordinance on the ballot, called Proposal B.
“You couldn’t tell which one was different,” she said, because the descriptions were almost exactly the same.
On November 8, Detroit voters approved Proposal B with 53 percent of the vote, while rejecting Proposal A by a similar margin. The grassroots coalition couldn’t compete with their opposition’s mass advertisements, Tlaib said. In TV ads, Detroit residents didn’t see “Vote Yes” on Prop B, it was always “Vote No” on Prop A, she said. She believes that their opponents didn’t necessarily want Prop B to pass; they just didn’t want Prop A to win.
“The fake CBA has been a thorn within city administration,” Tlaib said. “Now they have this weird so-called community benefit agreements. There are tremendous amounts of complaints that this is not what [voters] expected.”
Mystery lady with graph
St. Louis city is expecting a $17 million shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year. On May 17, members of the aldermanic Ways and Means Committee held a poorly advertised “community input meeting” to listen to residents’ comments about the proposed budget cuts.
About 10 people gave comments, and the last person to approach the microphone was a woman carrying a homemade poster with a giant graph on it. She said her name was Michelle, and she launched into an incredibly detailed explanation of how city voters have been completely snowed on how the local use sales tax revenue is being allocated.
The use tax – or business tax – goes up whenever the sales tax rises. Back in 2001, city residents voted to create this use tax and to allocate its revenue to public health and affordable housing, she told the audience.
“In 2002, the mayor announced that so much excess funding was coming in from the use tax that they wanted the voters to allow them to also spend the funding on public safety, demolition of derelict buildings and preservation of neighborhoods,” Michelle said.
Voters were confused and ill-informed when they approved the 2002 proposition to spread the funding around to the other departments, she said. Then in 2003, all the funding for public health that came from the city’s general funds – approximately $7.6 million – was eliminated and the Health Department’s entire budget was moved to the use tax funds, she said. (St. Louis City Budget Director Paul Payne later told the American that she is right about this.)
So public health never got more money like voters had intended – the budget was just moved around and even decreased, she said.
“With the proposed 2018 budget, the city plans to decrease public health funding another 15 percent, which results in a total 27-percent decrease since the use tax passed and a 51 percent decrease since the public health funds were cut in 1999 which triggered the need to create a use tax in the first place,” Michelle said.
Since the use tax was approved, staffing for the St. Louis Health Department has decreased by 55 percent, she said. With the looming federal budget cuts, she pleaded with the aldermen to come clean with the voters and restore public health funding in the city.
When asked to review the woman’s numbers, Payne said he calculates a 5.1 percent decrease in the amount that the Health Department receives from the use tax funds from the current fiscal year to the upcoming year – a change of $12,701,225 to $12,049,232.
In her numbers, Michelle said she separated out certain budget amounts that are miscategorized as public health, such as animal control and “health safety net.” But even with that, Payne said he didn’t see how she got to a 15 percent reduction for the upcoming budget. He wasn’t sure about the funding decreases to public health from the past, he said.
At the meeting, Michelle refused to give the American her last name. But we identified her as Rhonda Bartow, an epidemiologist for the city’s health department.
