A development proposal in Chesterfield has caused a rift between local government and the Parkway school district.
Officials are considering $300 million in tax subsidies for a massive mixed-use development in an area that includes demolishing Chesterfield mall. The plans call for a new city center that would include apartments, retail, and office space, as well as a lakefront development under construction called Wild Horse village. But the nearby school district isn’t too happy about it.
Parkway district’s CFO Patty Bedborough told KMOX that the district’s main problem with the proposed TIF is that it creates around 3,400 residential units — which means more students in the district.
“So with that, we know that we have our base revenue that we receive now from the property. However, the majority of our new revenue that is from the new construction is being diverted to pay for the TIF instead of coming to the school district in order to provide a high quality education for our students,” Bedborough said.
Chesterfield officials say they have their numbers wrong when it comes to the estimate of new students that would come to the district. But Bedborough said that even if the numbers are much lower, they still won’t see any money for more than two decades.
“Even with those estimates going down to 10% over the first 23 years of the TIF, that still puts us at an operating loss of $44 million dollars over those 23 years,” she said. “So when the city of Chesterfield is looking at a lot of the numbers, they're going out 30 years. In their estimate, the last 25% of the 30 years, i.e. seven years, is when we will actually see the new revenue come in.”
However, Chesterfield’s mayor Bob Nation defends the project, and rejects the idea that the school district will see losses.
“The last thing I would want to do is do anything that would jeopardize financially our school district's ability to provide education for the students,” Nation said.
He also said that the district doesn’t necessarily have a correct estimate of how many new students will be joining the district, especially since some will go to private schools.
“That ratio, if you do the numbers, that's more like 5% or something like that versus 25%,” Nation said. “So I think there's a reasonable explanation for the huge disparity in the numbers that they are suggesting versus what we have sampled, and it provided realistic examples.”
Hear more from Mayor Nation and from Patty Bedborough on KMOX:
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