“Maybe it’s normal.
Maybe it’s legal.
But to me it smells like shit.
What I’m talking about is the fact that Missoula’s Stockman Bank has agreed to sign-off on $3.5 million in tax increment financing for the Mercantile Investors.”
I wrote that in July 2017.
Yesterday an article came out in NBC Montana that backed up my corruption claims.
You see, in March of this year the City of Missoula issued a $1.5 million bond to reimburse Stockman Bank for the same work that they already received the $3.5 million in TIF money for.
So first Missoula gives the $3-billion-in-assets-bank $3.5 million for some construction work they want to do, and then two years later they give them another $1.5 million for the work they already paid for once.
“There are a couple of things that are very unusual about that,” University of Illinois at Chicago professor Dr. David Merriman said when he spoke to NBC Montana. “The bank being the beneficiary of TIF funds and then also buying the bond is, in my experience, very unusual.”
Very unusual.
In fact, Merriman has “never seen an arrangement like the one between Stockman Bank and Missoula.”
That’s probably because this arrangement has always smelled like shit.
We all know bankers are greedy, and the greed of the Stockman Bank bankers is especially bad. Not only did they build a huge new bank downtown, but they built a huge new one over by Reserve Street, too!
Kind of shoots-to-shit the silly excuse the city has for giving the bank the TIF money in the first place.
“In the case of First Interstate, their options were to abandon the downtown location and build somewhere off Reserve Street,” Buchanan wrote, going on to say that, “If TIF had not been available, I do not believe there would be a bank on that corner,” Buchanan wrote.
Yeah, that's First Interstate Bank. The city actually pulled this shit on us twice.
I wish there wasn’t a bank on that corner. I wish we would have put in a multi-story building for affordable housing.
But that wouldn’t make the Missoula powers-that-be any money, now would it?
Oh, and who'll be one of the biggest beneficiaries of a sales tax in Missoula?
None other than large property taxpayers like Stockman Bank!
No wonder Missoula Democrats want a sales tax so bad here - they can give huge corporations like Stockman Bank even more handouts while the common workers of the city suffer from poor wages, a lack of housing, and social services they simply can't afford.
Welcome to Montana's liberal stronghold, where they never met a large corporation or bank they didn't like (to give money to).
