Nixon: Tax Credits Are Ideal to Clear STL Site, With or Without a Stadium
Date Posted: December 23, 2016
Posted In: Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: State tax credits totaling $40 million are ideal to clean up the proposed downtown St. Louis stadium site, even if the city doesn’t get a soccer team, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said Wednesday.
“This portion is not to build a stadium. It’s to clean the site up,” Nixon told reporters at Ameren headquarters for a news conference about a different topic. “I think that’s an appropriate use of economic development tools so that you can get inner city areas redeveloped quickly.”
Nixon, a Democrat, was reacting to Tuesday’s postponement of a vote by the Missouri Development Finance Board on $40 million in tax credits to go toward the $200 million downtown stadium plan.
The postponement came at the request of SC STL, the investor group trying to bring a Major League Soccer team to St. Louis.
SC STL leaders said they were reacting to comments from Gov.-elect Eric Greitens, a Republican, who called the public financing part of the stadium plan “nothing more than welfare for millionaires.”
Nixon’s comments marked the first time a top official has offered details on how the tax credits might be used. The city’s application to the state Development Finance Board includes cost estimates for cleaning the site that are either vague or yet to be calculated.
St. Louis Development Corp. Executive Director Otis Williams said it was not guaranteed that all of the $40 million would have gone to preparing the site for development.