From the PubDef archive — published August 20, 2007, restored 2026. Links and embedded media may point to archived copies.

VIDEO: BLAIRMONT BUS TOUR

By Antonio French

Filed Monday, August 20, 2007 at 12:00 PM

PUB DEF SPECIAL REPORT

Poisoning the well of good faith negotiations in trying to reach a compromise on the controversial Land Assemblage Tax Credit is the amount of anger and raw emotion people have towards its chief architect, Paul McKee, and the amount of damage he has done to a community already devastated by decades of neglect.

“Paul McKee creates blight,” said 5th Ward Alderman April Ford Griffin last week as she showed legislators and her aldermanic colleagues long-standing brick buildings which now sit with entire walls spilled out onto its once green yard.

She told the other lawmakers about reports from neighbors of mysterious men ramming Bobcats into the sides of buildings, which only months before housed families, causing the walls to fall onto themselves and leaving the building open to the elements, looters and drug dealers.

Some scenes in the video you are about to watch look like they were filmed in the most devastated areas of New Orleans. Mr. McKee and others will point to these images and say this is why he needs this tax credit. What is important for Missouri’s state legislators to understand, say city aldermen, is that just 18-24 months ago, many of these buildings were homes with families living in them. Then Blairmont came.

This is where the anger comes from.

But after all the anger surrounding this one man, what St. Louis’ Legislative delegation must remember is that this problem is larger than one man, even this man who in the short-term has made the situation worse.

There are 100 million dollars in much needed tax credits on the table. The challenge over the next few days is how to make them available to people who do care about these communities, organizations and developers who are respectful of the people of these areas and sensitive to their desires about the future of their community, and not to reward a man who has for so long, so blatantly disregarded the men, women and children forced to live next to his piles of bricks and self-made blight.