6-29-15 email from Buzz Davis to Selected Dane Co. Reporters
Dear Media Representatives!
Below is an example of the "games" Stoughton city staff are playing with the simple question of: What is the effective date of the more recent KPW Developer's Agreement.
Simply put - the attached DA shows one date of June 9, 2015 and others dates that show June 18, 2015.
Under state law individuals or groups have 30 days from the time the contract is "signed" to file a lawsuit in court.
Thus Stoughton Forward which is considering a court suit has 30 days which end like July 9th or maybe July 18th.
At the June 23rd council meeting the DA was to come up for reconsideration. The city kept secret from the alders that the mayor had already signed the DA. I believe all or most of the alders found out on June 23rd that the mayor had already signed the DA and many were stunned.
In early 2014 when the previous DA was passed by the council and the meeting concluded at 12:30 or so at night, Alder Majewski told the alders and city attorney that he was going to move reconsideration of the passage of the DA at the next meeting (two weeks later.)
The mayor then signed the DA that night between 12 and 2AM, after I believe, consulting with the city attorney on how to circumvent that alder's intentions.
The ruling was, at the next council meeting, that Alder Majewski's motion to reconsider was out of order.
Yet this time, because the DA was passed June 9th with an amendment that $.5 million in construction contingency fund could NOT be spent before the construction started, and because the mayor wanted to say that the DA was signed but wanted to delete that amendment, she ruled June 23rd that the motion for reconsideration was valid but only dealt with the amendment not the DA because the DA had been signed.
If you follow this congratulations. If you don't follow it you are like 99.9% of the public and maybe alders who say, "Huh, what just happened??"
As you may or may not know the DA passed by the council on June 9th had one other "minor" change.
WalMart had demanded that if the KPW development company goes belly up that WalMart wants the city to use the $5 million in TIF money to still pay for all the public improvements for the proposed SuperCenter or give the TIF money to WalMart and WalMart will then do the required construction.
On June 9 the council voted for this on a 6-6 split vote with the mayor then voting yes.
Some of us feel that such a major change to the TIF project is illegal under state law.
Secondly, the "but for" clause required for TIF funding of a developer just might be a hard clause to prove if the recipient of the TIF money is WalMart - the largest and richest corporation in the world.
Buzz Davis, Treas. Stoughton Forward
