Poof! The Costco store proposed for the city/county land near Home Depot has disappeared. In one of the stranger twists of the long and twisted history of the MIDA deal, it was announced last week that they never needed a commercial shopping center to subsidize the military hotel. The hotel will be built in Wasatch County, and the developer says he can build it, and subsidize the room rates, all within the scope of his roughly 300 acres. There will be the hotel itself, and there are discussions about a golf course (we need another golf course around here about as much as we need another hotel, but that’s another story), and some village concept commercial and market-rate residential. It all sounds quite nice.
So, after putting the community through several years of bare-knuckle negotiations over the size and location of the shopping center, it’s gone. The shopping center, at one time as large as 1.25 million square feet, and anchored by a Costco store, was the sticking point in all of this. A recreation facility and lodging for military personnel has always been welcome in concept. But it all went sideways when MIDA linked it to a proposed huge commercial center in a market that is already glutted with empty storefronts and struggling retailers in every commercial neighborhood.
The Costco never made sense. The population base necessary to support a Costco is huge. Assuming that nobody from Salt Lake would drive past the Costco there to shop at Silver Creek, the population to be served was more or less everybody along I-80 between Parleys Summit and Scotts Bluff, Nebraska.
But now there is an approval from Wasatch County, and the developer has said he never really wanted the commercial project anyway. It wasn’t his idea. If the hotel developer didn’t want the commercial project, who did? Where was the push for that coming from? Although local officials seemed uncomfortably smitten with Costco, they were resisting the commercial project, insisting that it shrink by about a million square feet. So were there state officials looking to cash in on the commercial project? Were there legislators with a piece of the action?
We’ll probably never know. It’s optimistic to believe that the strange saga of MIDA is really over. But after several years of this, I think we deserve an explanation. The MIDA board is unelected and unaccountable. But something very strange was happening here, and I think we deserve to know what this state agency was doing and why it was using the power of state government to ram an apparently unnecessary commercial project through against the wishes of the local community. There’s some particularly stinky cheese here, and it’s not behind the counter at Costco.
On other fronts, things are getting interesting in the Midwest. It started in Wisconsin, where the governor decided to address the state’s budget shortfall by reducing taxes on businesses, and then unilaterally screwing the public employees’ out of their benefit packages. The proposal is to require the state’s employees to pay a significant portion of their health insurance and retirement benefits, shifting those costs from the state. It apparently results in about a 10 to 15 percent reduction in net pay. Private-sector employees have certainly experienced similar cuts. The unions are willing to go along with some of the cuts, but the legislature’s position is seen as an effort to bust the union. The union employees have vigorously objected.
The Democratic minority in the legislature has left the state so that there isn’t a quorum to conduct business. The same thing has happened in Indiana. (I think they are all staying at the St. Regis.) The unions in Iowa and Ohio are protesting similar proposals in their states.
Some people have tried to draw a parallel between the Wisconsin protests and what happened in Egypt. Other than a lot of angry people in the streets, I don’t see much similarity. I see a lot more similarity with the Tea Party movement. Despite coming from opposite political poles, both groups are made up of middle-class Americans who have finally woken up to the fact that they have been screwed for the last 30 years or so by a government that has been bought off by the corporate and financial interests.
Public policy is a cornucopia of treats for business. In the past 2 years, corporate profits have been up 30% while wages are up only 2%. The middle class is asked to fund corporate bailouts at the same time it is being outsourced and downsized into oblivion. I’m not a big fan of public-employee unions, but when it comes to the middle class demonstrating in the streets, all I can say is it’s about time.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column for nearly 25 years.