The city of Wilmington has already been ridiculed for spending lots of extra taxpayer dollars getting the parking deck back out of the hands of the people they sold it to downtown. Now they want to give away another $900k on a piece of property considered to be a “second location” for the baseball stadium.
An attorney with the Raleigh firm Parker Poe sent Deputy City Manager Tony Caudle a draft agreement indicating the city would pay $4.5 million for the Sawmill Point property. County records show the property sold to Sawmill Point Investors LLC in July for $3.6 million.
In other words, the people who bought the property would make a staggering $900k PROFIT in just a few months. That’s astounding in light of the devastating property devaluation that has taken place in downtown over the past few years. The property was foreclosed on just last year.
. . . first developed by RiverFront Holdings LLC principal owner Dave Spetrino – went into foreclosure. At the time the city discussed buying it, the property was owned by SunTrust Bank.
Spetrino, for those tracking such things, also receives taxpayer dollars through Wilmington Industrial Development as their chairman. He summarized his going financially down the tubes on the waterfront on this blog of his own making.
It wasn’t that long ago that crazy salaries were exposed by the StarNews for WDI, CEO Scott Satterfield took home $305,208 in base, bonus and incentive compensation in WID’s fiscal year 2009.
In 2009, New Hanover County and the City of Wilmington contributed a combined $214,656 through contractual agreements. They did the same in 2010 and still more tax dollars in 2011. John Hood documented this blog before.
Point is, the situation with the City of Wilmington remains incestuous and always end up passing taxdollars amongst a small group of insiders over and over again.
Also for those keeping track, the Chamber of Commerce continues pushing Richard Florida’s work with them even as he has consistently bashed cities building stadiums. It’s just funny!
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