‘I’ve had enough misinformation’: Austin discusses his past TIF projects, why he believes TIFs work, why he fights for them — and makes a promise

Bret Austin is the owner of Austin Properties, a locally-owned property commercial and residential development company in Quincy. However, he may be best known for his work on the Adams County Board and as the chairman of the Finance Committee.

In recent months, he’s also getting attention for his views on a possible third designated TIF zone in Quincy. TIF districts dedicate a portion of tax revenues generated within the TIF for improvements within those zones. The proposed TIF would be in the German Historic Village area, encompassing 14 square blocks and approximately 125 private parcels around Eighth and State streets.

Austin sat down for two interviews in the past week, hoping to clarify his stance on the project and address what he believes is misunderstood about his role and TIFs in general.

DA: You said you wanted to go on the record. About what?

BA: One thing I thought was really interesting at the (May 22) City Council meeting was Alderman (Jeff) Bergman’s comment about a backroom deal. If this hasn’t been the most dissected, digested and podcasted issue in the history of Quincy politics since I’ve known anything about it, I would be surprised. There have been no less than 15, 16 points of contact on Muddy River News about it. I came on and talked about it. The city planner came on and talked about it. The assistant city planner came on and talked about it. There are multiple avenues, multiple stories. How anyone at this point could say that it’s some sort of backroom shady deal is really beyond the pale. That’s a pretty big hyperbole statement to go that far. 

I’m taking Alderman Bergman at what his intent was — and I think there was intent there, to make a solid suggestion about if there is real support behind this. if I’m going to allow that latitude, or everyone allows that latitude, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem personally with Alderman Bergman’s comments. He asks good questions. He’s been a good leader on the City Council in terms of gathering information. In this particular thing, though, it started off with all of that, and then it was like, “Well, it just feels like some backroom deal.” Why say that? Why do that? That is not anywhere close to the truth. It just isn’t.

DA: Why do you think (Bergman) thinks it’s a backroom deal? Do you think others feel the same way he does?

BA: You haven’t seen one statement like that out of the (Adams) County Board or John Wood. You did see the Park District vote. Quite honestly, I have several issues with what the Park Board did. It’s not that they can’t have a vote (about TIF South). Maybe this issue gets tabled a little bit longer. All that will probably happen. There’s no issue with what Bergman said about letting the process play out. But the point is, there’s no cure. No one was trying to ramrod through something. There are legitimate concerns on the City Council. It’s communication and misinformation. Misinformation comes from social media. It comes from your own media. It has become agenda politics. We’re losing the bigger picture of what is just an economic development tool. People, including myself, have been attached to things like we’re somehow double-dealing or double-dipping. The reality is I do very little with TIF projects.

DA: Is the last TIF project you did the Maine Course building?

BA: It was Seoul to Seoul. It’s been several years. I think I’m in the last year of that one. It’s been over four years because it’s a five-year deal. 

DA: When did you buy the Maine Course building? 

BA: 2014 … for about $47,000. I put $180,000 of my own money into it, and $60,000 of TIF money went to redoing the apartments that were upstairs and the general recruitment of getting a restaurant on the first floor. The building had serious roof problems, no back deck, no means of egress. The building was resold for around $356,000.

DA: So you played “the game” the way it is designed to be played?

BA: Correct. I bought it in 2014 and sold it in 2019.

DA: What other times did you get TIF money for a project with your name on it?

BA: Seoul to Seoul. Got about $20,000. We bought the building for about $65,000. We originally put Krazy Cakes in there. It was about a $100,000 build-out for the kitchen. We built it so that it could be any kind of cafe or restaurant. Eventually, we did the one apartment up top. I wasn’t even hunting that project as a TIF project. It just came up that through the course of the money allocated for that year, the city only had two applications. I was actually asked, “Do you have anything going on that would use this program?” I said, “Well, I’m going to put a bunch of money into this building.” This could be a kind of a one-off. At the time, though, I was starting to get more reluctant about being involved in TIF projects, because I was much more heavily involved in the County Board.

I absolutely understand and get where some of the cross of that comes from. I had heard somebody was considering an amendment that said no County Board member could be involved in a TIF project. That seems pretty targeted. If you want to go down that road, you better say “any elected official” — and that even means precinct committeemen. You’re talking about several hundred people, probably in elected positions, who also do property and development. You’re also talking about taking a huge section of the potential development market out and just going, “Oh, you guys can’t participate because we don’t trust you doing this.”

In total, there was $80,000 of public investment TIF money versus $400,000 of private investment in those two buildings. The (Maine Course) is already sold. The taxes on that building were $1,200 when we bought the building. The taxes on that building now are $14,000. Do the math. The $60,000 (in TIF money) is paid back in six years, and now you get to collect $14,000 forever. Property investment is one of those appreciated value things that you can get into and legitimately gain value, equity and wealth.

DA: Can you explain how a TIF works? Make it simple for people like me.

BA: A property is worth $100,000 and becomes part of a TIF. The current tax bill, before it’s in the TIF zone, has $100,000 fair market value. It’s important to use the right term — fair market value. It means somebody should pay $100,000 to buy that building from you. The average tax percentage in Quincy is 7 percent on one-third of the fair market value, so for a $100,000 building, the taxes are usually right around $2,500 — TIF or no TIF.

So the TIF starts. A person does nothing for 23 years. The taxes are whatever the tax rate is, whenever they went up, whenever they went down. Now 23 years later, let’s say the schools raised the rate a little bit, the county raised the rate a little bit, the city raised it a little bit, and now the property is paying $3,400 in taxes. That’s the no TIF example. The value of the property goes up a little bit because it’s reassessed or whatever, but nothing significant gets done with the property. 

(When a TIF district is enacted, it has a 23-year life span. It can then be extended another 12 years, but those extensions have to be voted on by the Joint Review Board.)

Same $100,000 building, and now it’s in a TIF. A guy gets a partner, and they invest $50,000 in that building. They put in $25,000, and $25,000 came from the TIF, kind of like the downtown rental rehab program. I’m talking about money, not just for streets, but money that you made a deal with this property owner to make his property better. A building permit has to be pulled. That’s part of every agreement. At the end of that, they ask if the building permit is done and for the final number of your estimated improvements. So the person writes down not only the money they put in but the TIF money as well on a building permit that the building now should be worth $150,000. Now they have a $150,000 property, but the same $2,500 is still going to all the taxing districts from the $100,000.

The TIF is getting $50,000, divided by three, roughly $17,000. Multiply by 7 percent, you get roughly $1,100. All taxing districts are getting $2,500, split however they split it, and the valuation into the TIF is going up by $1,100 — $50,000 of fair market value, $1,100 of taxes. What happens over the next 23 years? The fair market value is now $150,000 forever. It can’t go back down unless (the building) falls down, burns down or becomes dilapidated. The TIF marches on and on. You can still have $3,400 a year coming in, and you will still have maybe $1,400 or $1,500 coming in on the TIF value.

DA: Over the years, how many TIF dollars have been available to the public? 

BA: It’s north of $6 million. 

DA: And you used $80,000 for two projects.

BA: I was never involved in the first TIF. Both of those projects were in the second TIF, which started in 2010. I actually was against the TIF when it came out for certain reasons I thought were valid. First of all, a TIF was coming over the top of the enterprise zone district that I already had property in. My understanding of when I bought the buildings is that as I developed it, I would have frozen property taxes for 10 years on those commercial buildings (through the enterprise zone). I didn’t see the benefits of the TIF when it first came out. I also was against a TIF because at the time, the state was talking about making anything that happened a TIF sort of a government project, and then everyone would have to be paid the prevailing wage. Well, that’s 25 percent gone off your money. If you’re going to make it all prevailing wage, why do it? I spoke in 2010 to the City Council. I’m sure you can go find it. I spoke very negatively about it. Then I got more involved in understanding it.

DA: Because of your position with the County Board?

BA: No, this was far before. It was just a property developer. I started to look around the state and in the Midwest. There weren’t a ton of TIFs. We have a longer history with TIFs than most any community in the Midwest. The Holiday Inn was originally built with a TIF in the early 80s when it was a brand new, shiny economic development tool that nobody used. It was very successful. TIFs can be very successful for one issue, but also those are usually so short and compact that you don’t build up a lot of money in the TIF so you can do any other projects. You’re just doing one project — a school, a hospital, a university extension. If I could give any guidance, or if I have the experience to talk to anybody about this and they want to listen, I had a wholesale change of heart. It wasn’t because somebody was going to give me a free $80,000 or whatever you want to say. It really was because the enterprise zone by itself does not work.

DA: Explain the difference between the enterprise zone and TIF.

BA: Passive and inactive is how I would say it. An enterprise zone is a passive tax incentive. You’re going to buy this property, you’re going to develop whatever you want to do with it, and we’re just not going to charge you those taxes for five years on a residential (property),  10 years on a commercial. You’re not getting any money to actively do the project. You’re just passively getting a reduction in your expenses. 

TIF is an active, sort of forward-looking thing that says, you do this, we give you this grant money. But by the way, on the back end, we’re going to assess this property and you’re going to pay the property taxes for what they really are. You get the money front-loaded. The taxes come back later. TIF is nothing more than a revolving loan fund. I really wish they would have come up with some other acronym. The minute you put “tax” in the title of anything, people are like, “Oh, here we go, government over control, look at the scams that will be done with this.”

My wife (Joi) works for National Main Street as a senior program officer. Travels all over the country. She’s probably in six to 10 downtowns a month. Now, I have all these years of experience. Our consultant had 20-some years of experience. Not once in Joi’s experience or anything I’ve seen or the consultant’s experience, have we ever seen the entity which is the beneficiary of getting the TIF money arguing against it. If all of the other taxing bodies are just passively letting this happen, and you’re basically equating the financials, why not look at it and go, “Well, I mean, I can see the benefits of what you’ve got here, and it doesn’t hurt us. I mean, it doesn’t cost us anything. Yeah, go for it, man. Just do your thing. Make sure we have a voice on the Joint Review Board. We just want to look at it every once in a while, a couple of times a year, and make sure nothing kooky is going on.”

DA: What I read in a lot of online commentary, mostly Facebook, goes like this: “Yeah, but you’re taking money for these projects that could be used for street repair or for schools or something else.” Can you answer that issue?

BA: There’s an answer for it, but it goes against the grain of what people understand from a dollars and cents point. I’m not disparaging people for what they do and don’t understand. The simplest way I can say it is this: What money are you giving up? You start a TIF with $0. Zero. On top of that, the only way an area can qualify to have a TIF is that it’s either flat or declining in their EAV (equalized assessed value). Not only are you giving up zero, but you’re also potentially compartmentalizing something that was dragging you down to get better.

The minute somebody says — I keep hearing it repeated, I’ve heard it repeated in this media outlet, I’ve heard it repeated at City Council, I’ve had these discussions at County Board — that you’re diverting funds from some other taxing body, that is untrue. The only way that could be true is if you suppose that, all things being equal and there’s no TIF and you don’t do anything, all those property values are going to go up and those entities would have gotten their taxes.

DA: So when you say an area has “flat-lined,” does that mean a specific period of time, like five years or 10 years?

BA: Usually it’s a declining value a flat or declining value over multiple decades. I deal a lot with tax rates. I don’t want people to over assume things. When I say a property has flat EAV, it’s not that the taxes can’t go up on the property. People mistake the two. You’ve got rate, and you’ve got appreciation. Appreciation can and will happen in good areas where properties are properly maintained. Rate is under the control of the taxing bodies. (Taxing) bodies can turn up the rate in an area. I’ve had people come at me with, quote unquote, data and go, “They’re collecting more taxes out of that area.” I go, “Well, look, the rate’s 20 percent higher, so of course, they’re collecting more taxes, but the properties didn’t appreciate in value.” The value was the same, and the rate went up. We’re trying to create value going up with the TIF. Hopefully the result of that is the taxing bodies can hold, or even lower their rate, because there’s more money in the pool. People don’t equate those two dials working in partnership, or sometimes in opposition, to each other.

DA: How much money does a TIF take from each of those six taxing bodies? The money is just taken from the area designated by the TIF. Let’s talk about the first TIF, TIF West. When did it start? 

BA: That started in 1998 at zero.

DA: And it’s now at?

BA: $640,000 a year.

DA: $640,000 a year in extra taxes that the city wasn’t getting before?

BA: Correct, assuming that you could stand in line in time and say that 1998 properties are worth what they are today. This is where I think a lot of people are sort of just like, “That’s not common sense, Bret. That doesn’t make sense.” The reality is: How would those properties have appreciated naturally?

DA: … had the TIF not been established? 

BA: Correct.

DA: How many years did you have to go where that TIF area had a flat EAV?

BA: What year did the mall open? 1979?  I walked through it when I was like 9 or 10 years old that year. Go back and look at the property values. They just nose-dived. There were only a handful of stores on the (Washington Park) square. An important point I don’t want to forget. I talked a little bit about the money I received on those two projects at $80,000 out of $6 million or whatever (in TIF dollars). More than 85-plus percent has gone to city infrastructure.

DA: When people read “infrastructure,” let’s make sure they all know we’re talking about.

BA: Streets, sewers, curbs, lights. I know a couple of the aldermen had it in for brick pavers. Get over it already. It’s a neighborhood. We’re trying to create a neighborhood vibe. There’s a little bit of extra cost in that. The payback is that you’re creating this retail, entertainment, all of that. The reality is that in 2021 when (TIF West) came up for an extension (TIFs are in place for 23 years but can be extended for seven more years), I honestly think there were valid concerns. There was a valid discussion to be had about, “Hey, should we reset this to a certain point?” Maybe let loose, say, $400,000 of the $600,000 that was being collected and then disperse that to all the taxing bodies and say, “Hey, the new baseline is this if you want that extension.” Saw a lot of support for that. Talked about that a lot. 

People can believe it or not, but at the end of the day, it was the city that came to other taxing bodies and said, “Our work here is not done. The extension will help us with city infrastructure and keep these things out of our general fund. COVID happened and we’re weak on money. We’re not sure where our sales tax receipts are going. We don’t know PPRT (personal property replacement tax) is headed. These things we count on, but we don’t know if they’re even going to be there. This is one thing we can count on. This we control locally.” 

Other than a relatively small portion — I would say $100,000 to $150,000 a year in the Downtown Development Program, the apartment rehab program — all the money went to infrastructure, parking lots, all of it. Riddle me this: Where does the city come up with $6 million of infrastructure money if (TIF West) doesn’t exist? We’ve got a few nice parking lots. We’ve got two or three more to go. One’s on the docket coming up. Do you know how much money the $6 million (in TIF dollars) got the city in grant money? Another $3 million, and now soon-to-be $6 million in grant money with Sixth Street. The money spent on infrastructure, you almost got one-to-one matching. You would never have gotten those grants without that (TIF money). People forget that.

DA: I believe people have said, “Well, you can’t tell me that the EAV wouldn’t have gone up a little bit.”  Let’s just say that it could have.

BA: The consultant proved that (the EAV) wasn’t going up. The current TIF South that we’re talking about is only going to be approved on the basis of a report vetted by the state and a licensed consultant who says, “Hey, this area is actually dragging you down.” What are you giving up? You’re putting a fence around an area that is dragging you down and saying, “Hey, we’re going to concentrate here for a little bit.” If all the other taxing bodies wake up one day and say, “I’d like a piece of that $640,000,” then come to some realization — which I think we have an overwhelming understanding at the County Board, and maybe this is the core issue at the City Council with the opposition — that you gave up nothing, only years later to be jealous of an amount that’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.

Here’s another analogy. Let’s say all of the taxing bodies have a bucket of water, and everybody has an equal amount of water in each bucket. The city’s bucket is leaking water. They’re going to need more water in their bucket. The taxpayer is paying for the water in all the buckets anyway. The county is not giving up any money. In terms of the EAV of the county, it was like .05 percent. But the county in its budgeting process can look at it and go, “Yeah, I see what you’re doing here.” 

When people say, “Oh, well, you’re taking that money. So now you’ve got to tax us more heavily,” well, name an entity that’s raised its tax rate. (The County Board hasn’t) done it. I’m the one who leads the budget. We’ve been flat or lower every year. What money are we missing out on? The city cut its tax rate last year to the lowest in many years. (Muddy River News) ran the story that the Park District has more reserves than it has ever had. What money is disappearing? What water out of anyone else’s bucket is the city taking?

DA: (By their votes on the Joint Review Board), all of these (taxing) entities are also saying, “We’re OK with it, because we take the extra water and put it in this bucket because we know what the money that bucket is going to help do.”

BA: It makes the community better. A couple of people on the Park Board are adamant that this is taking money away from them. They’ve got the most reserves they’ve ever had. Their tax rates have been flat. Their programming is awesome. I’ve never seen the Park District clicking on as many cylinders. They’re doing a huge (irrigation) project at Westview (Golf Course). They’re doing everything they said they could do. All they had to do was just make the assumption that it was like, “OK, well, we’re good. We’re doing what we need to be doing. Looks like we’re pretty good here. So you go for this TIF thing that you’re doing because it affects us zero.” But that’s not what’s happening because there’s been a steady drumbeat of somehow this is shuffling money or diverting money. It’s not. You’re growing more economy. Period. My bucket analogy is not that they’re taking our water. It’s that we’ve all got the water we need. This one just needs more in it because it’s leaking. Mostly it’s leaking because of infrastructure. If you stopped all the TIFs tomorrow and dissolved that fund, the county would get $70,000 — and then no more money would be coming after that. The city would get like $96,000.

DA: So if the county would get back $70,000, and the County Board has a budget of $61 million, it sounds like the County Board is saying, “Here’s $70,000 we can live without. We’re OK. Keep the TIF.”  

BA: The school district would get about half (of the TIF money if the fund was dissolved), so they would be around $300,000, but here’s a wrinkle. The mayor (Mike Troup) and Ryan Whicker (chief of business operations for the school district) and I had this discussion. You can say the school district would get half, and people start looking and say, “Well, that’s $300,000.” Out of what, a $90 million budget? Secondly, they won’t actually get $300,000, because if you put all that EAV back into the school district, the formula at the state says, “Oh, now we’re giving you less money.”  School districts like Naperville and around Chicago, they get zero state dollars. Some of them pay in so cities like Quincy can get money out. There’s no real gain for the school district.

DA: I’ve heard people say the TIF takes money the school district could be using for other things. Sounds like what you’re saying is that money is a very small percentage. It was similar to when (3^rd Ward alderman) Kelly Mays said (at the April 22 City Council meeting) she couldn’t understand why some aldermen wanted to take away $300,000 from the library as part of a $65 million city budget.

BA: I was very proud of her for that comment. She was pushing against the same thing that the TIF is pushing against. As elected County Board officials, what are we going to do better with $75,000? It’s a one-time lump of $75,000, you dissolve the TIFs and it’s gone. What are we going to do better with $75,000 than what the city can do? We’re basically saying to the city, “We trust you to use this money wisely for the benefit of the whole community, and all boats in the harbor will rise.” We will come out of this with a larger productive pie. 

The thing that never gets talked about: What happens when the EAV rises? It’s because the buildings are full of people spending money and sales tax and business sales tax and food and beverage tax and all of the things that the other commerce drives. If you take that TIF away and you don’t have that development tool in your toolbox, you’re not getting those businesses. You’re just not getting there. As I would like to scream from the mountaintops that the downtown is done and we’ve accomplished it and we conquered Mount Everest, we’re not there. And in some ways, you’ll never be there because it’s ever evolving. 

You want to drill down that I did two TIF projects and there was matching money? Whatever. Let’s go down that road. Every subdivision that’s been built in Quincy is incentivized because the city takes over the road. Without the road and the utilities underneath it that the city takes over forever, that builder cannot build a house and derive profit from it. Every subdivision was incentivized when Quincy wanted to expand because now the city has to take care of all that infrastructure. You don’t see the developers who built the houses 20 years ago plowing the roads. That’s a continuous expense. But we get a great benefit out of that because the property taxes, theoretically, pay for the infrastructure and allow Quincy to have more residents and grow and be productive. 

Before the whole TIF thing blew up (at the April 22 City Council meeting), 30 minutes earlier at the very same meeting, a sales tax development agreement (with developer Tom Marx for the former Sears building) was unanimously passed with no discussion, no questions, no opposition, no money talked about. That agreement is worth $800,000 over 10 years.

DA: If (Marx) fulfills all the things in the contract …

BA: If the retailer comes and they meet their tax goals. Even if they don’t meet their tax goals, it’s still probably $500,000 or $600,000. They’re still coming. I want to be very clear about this. We need Tom Marx. We need the developers we have downtown. I think I play a little bit of a role in it but not at the level of Tom Marx. We need all of these. I am super, super supportive, that (the City Council) passed that. So why are we crapping on one thing that works to go do that? Like it’s a trade or something?

DA: If a TIF is such a good thing, why are there people who don’t like this? And is the answer to my question, “Because Bret Austin’s involved”?

BA: I don’t know. Check my ego. I hope not. Find something I’ve done wrong. Go find something that’s criminal. The one time I made a mistake, it wasn’t even really me making a mistake. It was just a procedural thing. The one time I made a mistake that could be documented was (the County Board) going into executive session and talking about salaries, which is apparently a big no-no. The State’s Attorney (Gary Farha) was sitting in the room and didn’t tell me it was an error.

DA: (making air quotes) “Bret Austin’s going to make millions off this. Somehow this money is going to end up in his pocket.”

BA: That’s not the way it works. Hopefully lots of people will make millions off this. I guess you can do this story and Facebook can light it up and whatever and say that I’m being disingenuous and I’ve lived off this. This media outlet has reported that I made my whole property business on the city loan program. Absolutely not true. (The city) came to me. They weren’t getting any loans. They said, “Would this be a program you would use?” I said the interest rates are too high. You’re inviting credit risk. Drop it to 3 percent. Interest rates at the bank were only at 5 percent at the time. Why would you go get 6 percent money from the city? You’ve got to do all the paperwork. You’ve got to get all the banks to get on board, because now they’ve got to do the paperwork, and developers don’t want to mess with that. For a while, the revolving loan fund was making loans at 6 or 7 percent, there were defaults and you’re inviting credit risk. You’re basically like, “Oh, I can’t get the money anywhere else.” That to me is just kind of a non-starter. 

No one can debate this anymore. It’s not just Bret Austin putting his name on it. There is an obvious bias of several aldermen who do not want to invest in the downtown area. Maybe I’ll give them this much credit: They feel that it’s too much in one area.

DA: Does that come back to people saying, “Let’s get rid of a TIF to create a new TIF”?

BA: That’s the dumbest thing ever. It’s working. It’s perfect. It’s a legal entity. It’s been passed by every board. I mean, I guess that’s the question. Do you have to have a vote by every board? The answer is no. But the answer isn’t no because of what Alderman Bergman says, like somehow there’s some insidious backroom deal? The answer is no because most taxing bodies, when they look at it intelligently, can go, “Does not affect us. If that helps you, go for it and sign off on it.” If somebody 22 years later wants to get sh**ty that they’re not getting their $96,000 … think about this for a second. To say that this program is some sort of backroom deal or shady or whatever totally misses the bigger picture. I’m sure I’ll take a lot of heat for this. It has to be, at this point, a very disingenuous evaluation of not wanting it to occur for these people or that area or whatever. If that’s the case, shame on that leadership. That’s not the way this is supposed to go. 

If they want a personal guarantee for me for the next two and a half years while I’m on the County Board — because I’m going to be done in two and a half years — that I won’t do a TIF project at the (Dick Brothers) brewery or whatever, fine, I’ll make it. Print it. Because if it’s that petty to this council that they’re going to go to that level, and if it’s that kind of conversation … actually, back up one step. I’ll make that promise. Don’t care, don’t care. If I ever ask for TIF dollars around the brewery, I’m going to ask for it in the same way that the Brewhaus Townhomes asked for it. I’m going to say, “I’m about to put millions of dollars into these brewery buildings. Would you please fix your 140-year-old sewer that’s leaking into my basement?” I’ll put the money in my building. You put the money in sewers. 

The downtown rental rehab program is the only program in TIF that crosses that border a little bit, but you cannot argue with the results of that. You may argue about the partnership part. Should you put money in somebody’s building? What we discovered is with TIF money, if you throw all of it into potholes, what do you get out of it? You don’t necessarily have to put it in somebody’s building. That does work directly, though. But you do have to do things, at least like the Brewhaus Townhomes thing or maybe the potential hotel thing (in the former Illinois State Bank building), in terms of what the return is for investing in this area. The sewers were not capable of handling those townhomes, TIF or no TIF. What if some angel investor just dropped out of the sky? Are you’re going to tell him not to do that because we don’t have the money to fix our sewer? Because if you do, then let’s just pack up Quincy, because you’re not going to get anybody to come here. I mean, it defies logic. It really just comes down to some sort of inherent bias or social media narrative. If that’s what it is, you’ve got my promise: No TIF requests for two and a half years or whatever when I’m on the County Board. Now, if you say that I’m not an elected official anymore, and I still can’t apply for it, well, now we’ve got a real issue.

DA: That was a possible way to make some people against the TIF feel better about it. If you’re an elected official …

BA: Yeah, but it’s got to be all (elected officials). You target the County Board? I’ve got a real problem. Obviously, if you’re on the City Council, you’re going to have to vote on these projects. There are conflicts of interest, perceived and real, and conflict of interest perceived is winning the day over conflict of interest that is real. That is the narrative of social media and, quite honestly, the narrative of politics right now. That’s a much larger discussion. 

I really hope that people on the City Council understand I represent roughly 6,900 people in this county in my district. seven districts divided by the number of people in the county. The aldermen represent about 5,700. Ten Facebook haters are not the way to vote, and that has actually been said at City Council in the last two weeks. “All I heard was from people who were negative.” Be the representative for the people you’re the representative for. Be honest with people and communicate with people. It isn’t that hard. I guess you could say national politics comes to the state, comes to Quincy, comes down to Adams County. It’s the trickle-down effect of very divisive politics right now. I hope we can solve these issues. I don’t know if there’s a fix for it. I do know it’s not serving the community very well, to be that divisive about things.

DA: Is that why you’re here?

BA: Yeah. It’s almost like I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough misinformation. I’ve had enough of that being the narrative. That narrative has been sponsored at times by this media company and other media companies. What it comes down to is this. It’s very rare anymore that an issue gets a holistic view, and people are like, “What would you decide?” Just lay it out there. I over-explain things. 

When the housing thing started at the county, it didn’t have a ton of support because it was kind of coming from me. I thought, “Is this another thing that Bret’s pushing because he’s in that industry?” Then we went out and did a housing study with GREDF (Great River Economic Development Foundation), and the city finally partnered on something, and we got that done. The housing study says, “You guys need mid-level apartments and market rentals.” Good to have the data. I know there’s a lot of grants coming in for low-income housing. Let those entities do what they do well. We need to focus and park our money up here in this middle level and do some market rate programs, too. Housing is a very critical issue in America right now. Ultimately, that passed unanimously at the county. 

There are a lot of people on that County Board who we all don’t see eye-to-eye every day. But can you come together and see eye-to-eye on a real problem when you’ve got the data? And I truly hope that all of us as elected officials will remember that, because it doesn’t seem to be happening a lot right now. 

DA: Explain how one TIF can borrow money from another. Do the TIFs have to share a border to share money?

BA: Yes. This isn’t some corporate raider thing, stealing money from one to help another. The City Council has approved many, many projects already that moved TIF money from one (TIF) to the other. That hotel (in the former Illinois State Bank building) is in TIF East, which only generates about $120,000 a year right now. TIF West is the one that’s been around longer. The city is moving ($500,000) to that hotel development. There was never a question about that. Why wasn’t there a question about that? You’re taking money from one to the other? Why wouldn’t you do it? It’s within a block (of TIF West). I hope that development goes. I’ve been super supportive of that. But that was a vote for $500,000 in the building. I’m not even sure I totally agreed with that vote, but at the end of the day, when you look at the project in general, you know, not bad if you can get it done. The Brewhaus Townhomes probably should have used ARPA money, because that’s what it was for. 

DA: I believe at one point, (aldermen) discussed using ARPA money, but then I believe it was Mike Rein who said, “We’ve got these TIF dollars sitting here. Let’s save ARPA for something else.”

BA: Interesting. Mike Rein was reliant on TIF dollars that were available. Hmmm. So how else would that project have gotten done? Suppose there was no COVID-19 period and no ARPA dollars. Suppose there was no TIF. How do you get Brewhouse Townhomes done? Someone is spending $7 million to put something in an area that can revitalize a whole neighborhood that was a former contaminated Superfund site with no value. Are you seriously telling that person with $7 million of investment in hand that you won’t spend $400,000 to fix your 100-year-old sewer? If so, pack up Quincy, and let’s go home.

You have to have these tools in the toolbox to have the financial resources available to meet that developer at that location and go, “We can help you with this.” It seemed to be perfectly OK where the Sears building is going to have a new retailer. Let me be very, very clear about this. I love Tom Marx. I have learned a lot from him. He is a major developer, far beyond the capacity of what I have. If he can bring that to Quincy, I’ll go out there and help clean the windows. The tax money that a retailer like that can generate, when the city relies on sales tax, is huge. But again, no discussion, 13-0 vote (in favor). No one’s saying anything about it. So the people support that, but I don’t know what’s in the heads of the people who aren’t supporting TIF, because to me, it looks like a lot of bias.

DA: Where do you believe the bias, the distrust, comes from? 

Well, there is an original sin. I was sort of the soup du jour, the flavor of the day Republican. Kyle (Moore) was a young Republican, I was a young Republican, and the mantra was we were going to get more Republicans elected, which we certainly did. Obviously, we had help with that on the national and state level. My original sin that created the animosity from the political side was that I openly and publicly supported (Democrat) Ben Uzelac over (incumbent 7^th Ward alderman) Terri Heinecke (a Republican). You will find that most of the tentacles of why people think I am somehow shady trace back to that. I’ve told many people I seem to have survived OK in the true Republican Party, the reasonable people who want to do good work in our community and not this far-right hater group. In the true Republican Party, I’ve survived very well and even prospered in some sense. In the hater group, I’m seen as a Benedict Arnold, a RINO, the ultimate turncoat because I openly supported a Democrat candidate over a Republican. The narrative promoted by social media mostly was that if you couldn’t trust me on that, you can’t trust me on anything. All I will say publicly is that ultimately, Terri was not a very good alderman.

DA: Last question. You have said you’ve only used $80,000 in TIF money for two projects, and the last time you applied for TIF money was in 2019. So if you don’t stand to make millions of dollars using TIF dollars, why do you care so much about it?

I have two sources of things that have driven a lot of the community aspect of being back. I never thought I would live in Quincy. I didn’t like living in Quincy when I was in high school. I grew up in Texas, but I came here for high school. After college, I came back here for a year. I understood that this quality of life is somewhat of an oasis and in a protected environment. Quincy became interesting to me. I lived in Austin, Texas. I came here for a little bit. I went away to the University of Illinois. I go to Chicago. I’d never really lived where you could just chill out. Quincy is a fairly isolated big town. You don’t see a lot of 40,000-person towns without anything significant around it for 100 miles. My basketball analogy is that Quincy is 5-foot-8 but we play like we’re 6-foot-6. We have everything that concentrates here. We’re the medical center. We’re a retail hub. We are in the middle of a three-state area. The 20-year-old me couldn’t put it into those words, but the 50-year-old me can. The quality of life subconsciously appealed to me because it wasn’t a rat race.

I’m protective of Quincy. I’ve been to other places and seen how they get shattered. When you’re protective of something and you see it starting to change and get shattered … my belief is it happened in the mid-2010s. COVID came along. That’s a big disrupter. In the last seven to eight years, places like Quincy are ripping themselves apart because of social media, media in general, biases, politics … breaking out into clans and factions when we were all one community at one time. Maybe as you get older, you romanticize the old parts. 

The TIF is just one little part. I don’t even understand the big hoopla about it. The amount of dollars we’re talking about are less than two other bigger deals that just got approved. Period. Giving back to community, I’ve always believed in it. When I saw (Quincy) starting to shatter, I thought, well, I’ve got some experience, I can help. But our culture seems to think if you’re an expert in the field, you shouldn’t participate in the field. Wait a minute. I’m a property guy, a developer. I own real estate. These programs can help other people get into real estate or other property developers to develop. But I shouldn’t be a part of that discussion because I’m already involved in it? What’s the sense in that? Everybody is excited about the two investors (Ryan Jude Tanner and Jay Krottinger) coming into town (from Tulsa) with the hotel project. I love those guys. I have great conversations with them. I want nothing but success for that hotel. It’s going to be an anchor in the downtown. I hope they knock it out of the park. I have no problem with them using TIF money. They’re thought of as heroes for coming into town. But what about the people who have been here doing it the whole time?