In what has become something of a New Year's Eve ritual, state officials late Friday awarded another set of tax credits to NorthSide Regeneration, developer Paul McKee's long-delayed plan to rebuild roughly two square miles of north St. Louis.
The credits, totaling $2.1 million this time, come from the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage tax credit program, which lawmakers created in 2007 to help McKee's efforts.
In three years, he has received roughly $30 million of the credits, which are awarded to reimburse the cost of buying and maintaining land in large swaths of poor urban neighborhoods, and of borrowing money to do it.
For the third year in a row, McKee's Distressed Areas application was stamped "approved" on the last business day of the year. McKee, the only person who's ever tapped the program, typically files his application late so he can claim as much reimbursement as possible in a given year. Now he'll go out and sell the credits to investors to help fund his project.
But this year's take is significantly smaller than previous years and well below the program's $20 million annual cap. It's a sign of NorthSide's slow progress — McKee bought little land this year, and thus had little to reimburse.
The figure may grow, however.
In a recent interview, McKee said he was hoping to close several purchases before year's end, including the 17-acre Bottle District north of the Edward Jones Dome, and would likely amend his state application if the deals go through. It was unclear late Friday if those deals have closed.
McKee, as he did last year, had to agree to pay back the state if a pending lawsuit challenging NorthSide's redevelopment agreement is successful. That case is now before a state appeals court, with a hearing set for Feb. 1.
Opponents won a lower court ruling in July 2010, persuading a judge to overturn the redevelopment agreement and its $390 million tax increment financing package on the grounds that the NorthSide plan was too vague to justify a massive subsidy. The project has been largely stalled since then, though McKee continues to work on small pieces of it.
All told, the 20-year project aims to spur $8 billion in investment in housing, office buildings and amenities across roughly 2 square miles north of downtown. McKee spent five years secretly buying about 900 parcels of land in the area before going public with his plans in 2009.
