Looking at the TIF map from afar, seeing it all at once in the tinyurl, looks curiously like a chalked police outline of a crime scene.
If it looks like a crime, and feels like a crime, then ...
...you make the conclusion.
VOTE NO on April 17
and tell your trustees how you feel about our town's future.
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By the way, that unfortunate decapitation is the Village Center. Because of the Village's inaction, cowardice, and altogether flabbiness, they left millions of dollars of increment on the table by not doing the TIF earlier so that this project could have been included.
WRONG !
The board was WISE ENOUGH and STRONG ENOUGH to withstand wrong headed arguments in this case to see that development was occurring without a TIF, so it could not, and should not, be included in a TIF. They acted properly.
BOARD:
Continue your wise ways and do not establish a TIF district now as development is happening already. We also know more about this thing called TIF and know it can put the schools at risk as well as displace private property owners.
Let development continue as the free market allows.
Follow our ordinances.
Tighten the B2 ordinance to not allow something like the 'Olmsted Commons'+, which would certainly be contrary to what Riverside is all about, which is low density, elbow room, charm, non-congestion, 'tranquility, a unified landscape' with its surrounding area, as it says in the vision statement.
In short, we have the goods already in the town itself; clean and polish it up and market it.
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+For anyone who does not know:
Olmsted Commons is one of the visions that came out the recently held workshops.++ It is actually steps beyond a vision since it had an architectural firm do a rendering and a brochure along with project cost estimates. It also had a plan, by the project owner's own statements made in public, for the displacement of blocks of private property using eminent domain, which use is enabled in a TIF. Since the use of eminent domain is by definition not neighborly, decent and cooperative, is it also contrary to Riverside's vision or essence.+++
Therefore the TIF is contrary to the proper idea of Riverside. The Olmsted Commons project is a sufficient example, or test case, to invalidate the TIF and some of the B2 Ordinance that would allow it to spawn. Note: the Olmsted Commons, by its own admission, needs no variances to the B2 ordinances; it just needs a TIF. Its brochure can be used as promotional material by opponents of the TIF.
++
Trustee Shields said that there was nothing that he saw in the 9 workshops that would preclude him from opting for a TIF in Riverside. In a similar manner in which St Paul talks about the 'eyes of faith', there seems to be a notion of 'the eyes of TIF', where, with these eyes, one can look at a project such as the Olmsted Commons and SEE things such as high density, cars, congestion, busy-ness as all good. With those kinds of eyes, one can understand how they would not see the good in quiet tranquility, unified landscape etc. One can see, in fact, how those kinds of eyes would produce ayes for the TIF.
+++ see the vision statements under consideration
http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic.php?id=206&page&replies=11
