Curley: Try tax breaks rather than handouts in Seattle’s Central District

Rather than give mitigation money to small business owners in the Central District negatively impacted by construction, KIRO Radio’s John Curley thinks there is a better solution: tax breaks.

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On Monday, Mayor Ed Murray proposed creating a $650,000 fund to small businesses on 23rd Avenue to mitigate the effects of the construction overhaul that has impacted car and pedestrian traffic and is expected to last through February 2017. The announcement was a reversal from officials’ previous insistences that there was no legal way to offer mitigation money to the businesses. According to The Stranger, the city would create a fund using $400,000 in federal Community Development Block Grants and $250,000 in funds from a federal tax credit program meant to encourage development in low-income areas.

“It is obvious that the project is having serious impacts on those businesses,” Murray said Monday. “It is obvious that they need help.”

The Seattle Times reports the money would be targeted toward businesses with five or fewer employees at greatest risk of closing, with about 20 to 30 businesses that will qualify.

Rather than squabble over who is eligible for this relatively small handouts, Curley says a business that might make $100,000 or $250,000 in revenue might be better off with a tax break.

“Why don’t you give them a break on their taxes, on their sales tax, why don’t you let them slide on that?” he asked. “Because when you break this thing down, isn’t each one of these businesses going to get maybe $25,000-$35,000.”

Co-host Tom Tangney noted that mitigate doesn’t mean replace, but more to soften the blow of the issues. Nonetheless, if all this work and money the city is putting into the area actually ends up swooshing people out of business, via gentrification or otherwise, it doesn’t really help.

Curley says gentrification of the neighborhood will ultimately be beneficial to the residents.

“The best thing they can do in that Central District is this: Bring the rich people in,” he said. “Then what you do is you have them build homes; the prices go up on the homes, you get tax, you get revenue, you get service. Then have the city slap an affordable housing thing on top of it.

“If you don’t want gentrification, you could move to Detroit, and you could enjoy the streets of Detroit, where that’s the opposite of gentrification,” he said.