Eugene weekly., April 26, 2012, Page 11, Image 11

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Capstoned
Private student housing to the 1,200th degree
I
t’s a barfi ng-puppy-sounding acronym,
and the prospect of either granting or
not granting the MUPTE — Multiple
Unit Property Tax Exemption — to the
proposed private 1,200-student housing
complex at 13th and Olive makes a lot of
people sick for a number of reasons.
Eugeneans agree that moving as many as
1,200 college students to the 2,717-resident
(according to 2009 data) downtown neigh-
borhood will drastically change it. But the
April 23 City Council public hearing made
clear that the debate centers on whether
granting the development a 10-year property
tax exemption is fair — and if so, whether
downtown and the adjacent areas will be-
come more bustling and vibrant or turn into a
West University-style party zone.
If granted the MUPTE, the proposed
project, often referred to by its developer’s
name, Capstone, would be exempt from
property taxes on its buildings for 10 years,
to the tune of $846,000 per year. The council
could vote on the MUPTE as soon as May 9.
Capstone representatives have asserted
that they’d like to continue managing the
complex for some time, but that’s not what
the company typically does after selling,
usually after a few years. Councilor George
Brown researched about 25 different
student housing projects that the builder
has developed and found that Capstone
doesn’t continue to manage any of them.
Capstone has built and sold one complex in
Oregon, the University Commons complex
on Kinsrow, occupied in 1999 and a major
police time-suck by 2003. “Once you start
Googling those sites that they no longer own
or manage, the quality of management goes
down pretty rapidly,” Brown says.
Brown says that at the very least the
city should sign a binding, transferable
management covenant with Capstone,
guaranteeing a particular level of on-site
management and strict terms in its leasing
contract.
Betty Taylor, so far the only councilor to
announce that she’ll be voting against the
tax break, says that although she sees pros
and cons to the project itself, she thinks
it’s time to stop giving the tax exemptions
because of the tight city budget. “I voted for
tax breaks for the very heart of downtown
just to get started, and things are getting
started now so I don’t think we need to do
that any more,” she says.
Taylor says she hears from constituents
about fairness “every time the council gives
a tax exemption. Someone says, ‘Well, I
built something and I didn’t get anything.’”
The question of fairness is deemed an
issue because Capstone’s application states
that backer Kayne Anderson requires a
9 percent minimum rate of return on the
project; without the MUPTE, the projected
return would be 6 percent — still a profi t.
“If the majority wants to go through with
this, I think that there’s a line somewhere
in between that Kayne Anderson would live
with,” Brown says. “We have a tremendous
opportunity to negotiate true public benefi ts
if a majority of the councilors believe that
this project should go through.”
City Attorney Glenn Klein said during
an April 9 council work session that the
number of years the project is exempted
can be adjusted to less than 10 years, but he
doesn’t think it would be legal to adjust the
percentage of building improvements below
100 percent. He said the city code’s mention
of council setting the percentage refers to
tax exemptions for commercial parts of the
building (Capstone’s proposal exempts 5,000
sq. ft. of commercial space from taxation).
Portland’s equivalent of MUPTE is known
as NMUH, and the Portland Housing Bureau
is fi nishing up a “Big Look” at tax-abatement
programs in that city. Portland Senior
Housing Policy Adviser Kate Allen says that
although she can’t name a Portland project
that has received less than a 100 percent
exemption rate, she doesn’t know a reason
that would prohibit smaller exemptions.
NMUH has a different way of ensuring
it isn’t subsidizing oversized corporate tax
breaks: It has a ceiling. No project receiving
an NMUH tax exemption can earn more than
a 10 percent rate of return per year. “The
regulatory agreement gives us the right to
claw back excess profi t,” Allen says. “That
can either be done by a recapture of the
exemption or it can be done by an extension
of the period of affordability.” This means
the complex has to return money or provide
lower-priced housing for a longer time frame.
Allen says that one of the big changes
being recommended by the Big Look is
limiting the total amount of exempted tax
revenue to $1 million annually, which she
says is split between four to six projects.
The Eugene City Club’s 2010 analysis of the
08-09 fi scal year says that $1.323 million in
exemptions was foregone that year.
Eugene’s Community Action Team
(CAT) was unanimous in fi nding that four
“essential elements” are required to make
Capstone a positive for downtown: legally
enforceable management requirements
and lease provisions; a plan to protect
the residents of Olive Plaza; an inclusive
traffi c analysis of effects on bicycles and
pedestrians; and a city analysis of policies,
codes and regulations that would produce
recommended amendments to protect
surrounding neighborhoods.
Capstone had not yet commented on
CAT’s essential elements at press time.
— Shannon Finnell
Occupying Bill Ayers
Educator, ex-member of Weather Underground at the UO
S
ome know him as a co-founder of the Weather
Underground, aka the Weathermen, a Vietnam-era
group that bombed public buildings in protest of
the war.
Still others know him as a respected author, thinker and
professor of education, even as the writer of a comic book.
“Obviously no one, not even me, knows exactly who I
am, and I’m living it,” says William “Bill” Ayers, who points
out that despite media labels of terrorist, communist or
radical, he is a husband of 40 years, a father of three grown
sons and a professor retired from the University of Illinois.
Ayers will speak April 26 at the UO on organizing for
social justice during troubling times in democracy.
“I fi ght for the public schools, education, democracy and
justice,” Ayers says. “I have been an antiwar activist my
whole adult life.”
A conversation with Ayers is wide ranging, impassioned
about everything from Occupy, which he supports; to labels,
which he doesn’t; to social justice. He says he has been
involved with direct action most of his life and anticipates
being arrested when he participates in nonviolent civil
disobedience as part of a protest against NATO in May when
the organization comes to Chicago.
“I believe in it as a tactic,” he says.
He says that he gets asked often if he has renounced
violence as a tactic, or if he regrets the Weather Underground
bombings, but points out that it’s odd that those such as John
McCain, who killed people during the Vietnam War, are not
asked if they have renounced violence.
Ayers says that every week during the Vietnam War,
6,000 people were killed and “I can’t fi nd a reasonable way”
to equate property destruction with what John McCain did.
He says, “I am always asked about violence and the war
in Vietnam, but I never fl ew in an airplane over a civilian
population and intentionally dropped bombs on people.”
It would be “useful to have a truth and reconciliation
process, and put up on a stage everyone who’s over 50 or
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over 55, and have them say what they did from 1965
to 75, the years of the Vietnam War,” Ayers says.
“And I will say exactly what I did and I will take
full responsibility for it, I’ll say what I’m sorry for,
which is a lot, standing next to Henry Kissinger,
[Robert] McNamara, and Bush and Cheney and Gore
and McCain and [John] Kerry and [Bob] Kerry and
everybody else. And in that context I think we could
reach some reconciliation.” He continues, “In that
context I’d be more than happy to take full responsibility
for everything I did, and to be sorry for a lot of it.”
He points out that if you defi ne terrorism as an act
of violence randomly pursued against people in order
to infl uence their politics, then an individual, a religion
or a government, among others, can all perpetrate
terrorism. Organized governments have historically
committed the most acts of terror, he says. “What the
hell are drone strikes? What are those?”
Labeling protesters and those who have
participated in direct action as terrorists “is a framing
that’s convenient for power, but that is completely
inaccurate, so inaccurate that it blows your mind,” Ayers says.
Ayers argues that “the use of the domestic terrorism
label is overkill at the highest level.” A crime, or destroying
property, even federal property, he says, should be
prosecuted, but labeling it terrorism “adds nothing except
fear, ignorance and misdirection,” and “is a dangerous
direction for the country.”
Ayers is “a huge supporter of the Occupy effort” and
has occupied Chicago and Wall Street, and spoken at or
participated in general assemblies at 14 different Occupy
sites. “One of the things about Occupy is that it’s a metaphor;
it’s not a point of arrival, it’s an invitation, an opening.”
Radicals, he says, are people who try to get to the bottom
of things, go to the root. Ayers says that “to be a radical
is in part to get to the base of how things are framed and
reframe those things.” Occupy, Ayers says, has changed the
discussion of this country. We now talk about the 1 percent
and the 99 percent, and Mitt Romney’s taxes, which we
didn’t before, he points out.
The day before Occupy happened, “it was impossible,”
he says. “The day after it was inevitable.”
“We should all take Occupy’s invitation up and be part of
it,” he says, and go be part of the general assembly.
“In a democracy, even in an aspirational, fl awed, partial
democracy, whatever else we teach, we need to teach
initiative and courage and imagination, and developing a
mind of one’s own,” Ayers says. And that, along with the
right to an education, will be some of the focus of his talk in
Eugene. — Camilla Mortensen
William Ayers speaks on teaching and organizing for social justice 7:30 pm
Thursday, April 26, in Lillis 182 on the UO campus; FREE. A livestream will
be at wkly.ws/19f
EUGENE WEEKLY APRIL 26, 2012
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