After Kent leaders in October decided not to rezone almost 12 acres near the center of the city, the proposed buyer backed out, but the land is still in play.
Grey Fox Capital had proposed to build a residential rental community on the property and had asked the city to rezone the acreage from Industrial to R-3 high density residential....
Read moreSo will Hometown Bank pay back the taxpayers when they sell their cleaned up and much more valuable land? Didn’t think so.
I would be interested in better understanding your argument. Can you elaborate as to the principles on which you are basing it? Should those principles also apply to programs supporting low income residents?
@Jeff_Schrecengost I’m also interested in @J_Randall_Nye’s questions.
I’m just saying that Hometown Bank presumably knew the condition of the property when they assumed ownership. Now that the taxpayers are cleaning it up for them and the value and salability of the property will be increased I thought they might do the right thing and reimburse the taxpayers.
What this has to do with programs supporting low income residents I have no idea what you’re talking about. This is a Corporation and I thought Corporations were bad according to liberals.
@Jeff_Schrecengost I’m not one to defend corporations out of hand, but Hometown Bank didn’t contaminate the soil. If they had been aware of the state of the contamination and the responsibilities associated with that, they probably wouldn’t have bought the parcel, and likely the cleanup would still fall to the tax payers. I don’t know the history of the parcel but I wouldn’t be surprised if Hometown Bank held the loans on the land and repossessed the land when the companies that did the polluting moved or went bankrupt.
It would be nice if we held polluters accountable and made them pay for the damage they do to our land, water, and air. But our current legal frameworks make it far too easy for companies to get out of those obligations. Seeing as we have no realistic way to do that right now, I would say this is more a matter of making the land useable again so it can be developed and pay the tax base back with future tax revenue, rather than worrying if hometown bank might make some money off of the sale of this land.
It is my understanding that Hometown Bank gained ownership through foreclosure. If so, does that still make them “guilty?”
Hometown Bank is a community bank with local shareholders. It lends to local consumers and small businesses as well as providing fundamental banking services. What sort of “liberal” holds the position that a community bank is “bad?” I participate in discussions concerning the Public Banking Movement. That is “high end” liberal (but it should be favored by everyone that is opposed to Crony Capitalism). And they really love the idea of community banks partnering with a Public Bank.
You expressed a concern about “taxpayers.” So, if the taxpayers are important to you I was wondering if your concerns were consistent across the spectrum.
There are those in the community that have never paid taxes that cover the welfare system transfers they receive from the taxpayers at large. And it is likely they never will. Aside from some unique circumstances relating to Medicaid recovery that I am aware of (there may be others), nobody ever talks about clawing back government transfers to these folks.
The grants associated with Brownfield cleanup exist for the benefit of communities. If the risk-takers have to pay the taxpayers back, why not across the board when their fortunes change?
To communicate this better than I could, I asked Chat GPT for a couple of sentences that convey that liability for environmental issues is extensive for owners who may not have been the polluters:
”Under CERCLA (Superfund), “current owners and operators” can be potentially responsible parties for cleanup costs, even for contamination that happened under prior ownership (strict liability framework). EPA summarizes these landowner liability pathways and defenses.”
@J_Randall_Nye yes, the laws can hold current owners responsible for the cleanup of contamination. I’m sure there are some reasons for the language and cases where it would make sense. Say speedway buys an old BP gas station, when Speedway is done with the site you’re not going to parse what contamination Speedway is responsible for and only expect them to clean up 50% of the contaminated soil.
What I was referring to regarding how easy it is for companies to avoid responsibility for polluting was the recent attacks on the EPA’s ability to regulate polluters, and creative business practices, like the Texas two step bankruptcy. This practice allows a company to split into multiple entities, allocating toxic assets, lawsuit liabilities, etc to the subsidiary, then bankrupting the subsidiary which triggers bankruptcy protections that make it difficult for individuals or the government to sue the company for damages.