Mall shouldn't be subsidized

The Cape Girardeau City Council is considering legislation granting $52 million in tax subsidies to redevelop the West Park Mall. If subsidies worked as an economic development strategy, then St. Louis would be the Kuwait of the Midwest. The use of subsidies hasn't worked to grow the economy in St. Louis or anywhere else, and it won't work in Cape Girardeau.

Government economic development officials can't predict the future. That's why studies from around the nation find that subsidies are a wasteful use of tax dollars. City councils and economic development officials have no business deciding which private interests they should subsidize with your tax money. The alphabet soup of tax subsidies — TIF, TDD, CID — proposed for the mall will result in less money for other taxing entities, questionable extra sales taxes for shoppers, and a harmful increase in the involvement of local government in the economic life of Cape Girardeau.

Cape Girardeau County should institute a county TIF commission instead of city TIF commissions, like five other counties in Missouri have done. County officials have to consider the bigger picture, instead of caring only about what's good for Jackson or what's best for the City of Cape Girardeau. If county commissions made the TIF decisions — with no ability for cities to override the commission — there would be less abuse of subsidies in the region.

Cape Girardeau's leaders should resist subsidizing the West Park Mall redevelopment with $52 million of other people's money.

DAVID STOKES, St. Louis