$100 house doesn’t pass taxpayer smell test
Granite City leaders may have done the right thing for the right reasons, but they did it the wrong way and left a cloud of suspicion behind.
Selling a property that cost the city $74,000 to a former city councilman for $1,000 doesn’t smell right. Then taking action to reduce that to $100 adds another level of odor.
The former architect’s office at 1930 Cleveland Ave. in Granite City is a nifty little arts and crafts house that has lots of character but has been badly neglected. The city bought it to get a piece of the property needed for parking at the Granite City Cinemas it developed.
Former Councilwoman Brenda Whitaker has a track record of turning around buildings and creating or perpetuating three solid local businesses. She can be expected to do something good with this property, known as the Gabriel House.
The house has been a neglected nuisance and drawn homeless people, with police recently chasing off a group reclining in the home’s leather chairs and attempting to start a fire with old books. It needs a savior.
But Whitaker voted to buy the property and now is essentially benefitting from that vote. It got worse when she was the only bidder at $1,000 and her old buddies on the City Council decided that was too much, reducing her price to $100. Does anyone really believe that an extra $900 is going to make a difference in rehabbing that building?
Maybe Mayor Ed Hagnauer is right and this will be a good thing for the city in the long term. They certainly could have thrown a bunch of incentives at Whitaker that would have amounted to a much greater taxpayer cost than what they did, which was to essentially give her the house.
But smart leaders would have made this more of an arm’s-length transaction, maybe with minimum bids, maybe without reducing the winning bid and maybe with someone who didn’t just leave the council. As it is, taxpayers are left wondering whether they’ve been bamboozled.
This story was originally published April 5, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "$100 house doesn’t pass taxpayer smell test."