Instead of Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
I've long been aware I am not the only person who has read that particular newspaper to make note of the fact it is a bit of a sham of a real newspaper instead of a real newspaper of record of the sort one reads in most towns.
I have not read this Star-Telesham Can Fort Worth avoid becoming a Dallas suburb? City hopes tax breaks help article.
The comments and the original Facebooker who posted about this, that being Clyde Picht, told me pretty much all I needed to know about what this Star-Telesham article was about.
The first few sentences of what Mr. P. had to say. (I'll share the entire post further below)...
Clyde Picht February 4 at 4:38 PM ·
I've lived in Fort Worth forty three and a half years. In all those years it seems like Fort Worth has had a metropolitan inferiority complex. Now the "city hopes tax breaks help" land a major corporate headquarters. Maybe that will get us on a par with Dallas. Like giving tax breaks is a new idea? Hell, that's one reason I ran for (and won) a city council seat. In 1997 the council was ready to give Intel an abatement that would add up to over $100,000,000 if they completed all three phases of construction. Did they go to Dallas instead? No, they went to Puerto Rico.
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I thought that that Intel development went to Chandler, Arizona. Maybe both Arizona and Puerto Rico successfully got part of that Intel action. When I saw the Intel operation in Chandler, with my own eyes, it was no mystery why a corporation would choose to locate itself at that location, instead of Fort Worth.
Or why Fort Worth never seems to be in the running for much of anything. It does not take some sort of Doctor of Urban Development to see the problems with Fort Worth which would scare off a corporation looking to locate in a modern location.
What impression does Fort Worth think it makes when something like Heritage Park, a purported homage to Fort Worth's storied history, is a boarded up eyesore which has blighted the north end of Fort Worth's downtown for over a decade?
What impression does Fort Worth think it makes with its lack of a modern mass transit system?
What impression does Fort Worth think it makes with the obvious lack of competent urban planning resulting in HUGE tracts of housing on former open spaces, without adequate infrastructure in the form of everything from drainage, adequate roads, parks and that aforementioned modern mass transit system?
What impression does Fort Worth think it makes with city parks without modern facilities, but plenty of outhouses, with miles of city streets with no sidewalks, with no public swimming pools of the sort one sees multiple of in a town Intel did build in, such as Chandler, Arizona?
What impression does Fort Worth think it makes with something like the Trinity River Central City Uptown Panther Island District Vision, currently stuck in slow motion trying to build three simple little bridges over dry land to connect the Fort Worth mainland to an imaginary island? A congested eyesore with no current end in sight, with the ever changing project timeline now extended to near the end of the next decade.
Clyde Picht, wise observer of reality that he be, makes note of Fort Worth's metropolitan inferiority complex. I was not long into observing Fort Worth, up close, as reflected in the Star-Telegram, that it seemed to me the town seemed to have a massive inferiority complex, particularly with what seemed to me to be a bizarre fixation on Dallas that came across like a jealous sibling envious of its famous, more interesting, more dynamic, better looking, taller, big brother.
Years ago I made a webpage about an aspect of nonsense which I had thought ridiculous in the Star-Telegram, which I called Fort Worth's Green With Envy syndrome. A sort of subset of that massive civic inferiority complex.
Anyway, as promised, the rest of what Clyde Picht had to say about Fort Worth's attempts to lure suitors with tax breaks, including making reference to Fort Worth's over done penchant for TIFs. A civic behavior I don't really understand, which Deep Moat III has helped me understand a little bit better.
Clyde Picht's Facebook post in its entirety...
I've lived in Fort Worth forty three and a half years. In all those years it seems like Fort Worth has had a metropolitan inferiority complex. Now the "city hopes tax breaks help" land a major corporate headquarters. Maybe that will get us on a par with Dallas. Like giving tax breaks is a new idea? Hell, that's one reason I ran for (and won) a city council seat. In 1997 the council was ready to give Intel an abatement that would add up to over $100,000,000 if they completed all three phases of construction. Did they go to Dallas instead? No, they went to Puerto Rico. The city wants corporations to give high wages but they want to pay low wages.
When the city council majority voted to support a herd of fifty longhorn cattle in the stockyards to increase the tax base by millions I posted a web article suggesting that if 50 longhorns could provide so much economic impact to the stockyards, a herd of 2000 cattle could make the city flush. Nobody believed it, of course, and I doubt the cattle in the stockyards really pay their way.
So here we are today. TIF #9 is giving the Trinity River Vision, Central City Project, Panther Island debacle over $350,000,000, to support a project which has ballooned to over a billion dollars to increase the tax base by a billion when it gets completed and built out thirty, forty, fifty or one hundred years from now. Not being an economist all I can say is Gee Whiz!
Where do we get these geniuses at city hall that think bribing companies with tax breaks is better than providing a clean city with up-to-date infrastructure, good transportation, and a qualified work force? We already have a major transportation hub and low cost housing and qualified work force, so let's work on what we don't have and can the tax breaks.
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