Opinion: Who gets rich from the Northern Beltline? Not you...
By John Archibald | jarchibald@al.com AL.com
Birmingham, AL /Byline
What's a good way to spend taxpayer money?
That's easy. A good use of taxpayer goes into your own fat back pocket. A shameful use is when it goes into somebody else's.
It's the difference between a boom and a boondoggle, between a public service and a conspiracy.
Like the way Alabama public officials decry public spending of money they don't want to spend.
"Ladies and gentlemen, nothing is free," Gov. Robert Bentley said last year, back when he still refused to expand Medicaid. "The money the federal government is spending with wild abandon is not federal dollars — those are your dollars, your hard-earned tax dollars."
When he stood three months later to break ground on the $5.4 billion meandering Northern Beltline across Jefferson County he lauded that federal spending as a triumph over obstacles, a project that "will open up an area of the state that then will allow us to have more companies come in."
Your triumpth. Your dollars. Your $5.4 billion.
It's twice the amount spent – adjusted for inflation – on the Apollo 11 mission that first put astronauts on the moon.
It would – coming back down to earth – buy enough gas to fill up every car in the state of Alabama every week for the next two years.
Your dollars. For an incomprehensibly long, expensive and environmentally threatening route through parts of Jefferson County where few people live and fewer still could tap into county sewers.
But who really benefits? The people of Jefferson County? The people of Alabama? The people of Atlanta or Nashville who want to travel back and forth without ever having to come within a rifle shot of Birmingham?
The people who profit the most are those with large land interests along the route. This highway is the best hope for them to again strike it rich on abandoned coal and ore mines, for timber land to turn into some pricey spot to buy Timberlands.
Who profits? I go back, as I often do, to the analysis of property records by my old colleagues Tom Spencer and Jeff Hansen, who laid that ownership out clearly.
By far the biggest landowner along the Northern Beltline route is U.S. Steel. Which is less about steel in these parts these days than it is about real estate.
Next is Drummond Co., where the search for coal has also turned into riches on the real estate market.
Coal and timber company Alawest has large holdings along the route, and so does Walter Energy.
Of course Bentley and other politicians who fawn over the beltline don't personally profit from it, as far as know. They just get to claim an "economic development" victory.
That U.S. Steel, Drummond and Walter Energy all gave Bentley's campaign at least $10,000 in the last two years is just ... business as usual. That Drummond has poured $981,000 into Alabama political campaigns ($75,000 to Bentley) is just another ridiculous route to go down.
If the federal government – I'm sorry, if you want to spend $5.4 billion with wild abandon to build a 104-mile economic boost to help the rich stay rich, just stick out your thumb.
Just remember the rules. If the rich get richer it's economic development. If the regular guy gets the shaft, well it's just being responsible.
That's how the governor could boast this year of giving $27 million in state incentives to an auto supplier that will provide 150 jobs, while at the same time bragging that he cut 5,000 state jobs out of the executive branch payroll. I guess in the end that's how we know this Northern Beltline really is an economic development deal.
The rich get paid. And you pay.