Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor:
I thought your readership may appreciate an update on the Isle of Capri Casino originated Legacy Project, here in Clayton County, Iowa. Our local group's battle to dismantle this corporate welfare scheme is now entering its fifth year.
This government subsidized grand project's only component that shows life today is the River Bluff Resort LLC. This urban sprawl publicly financed resort-hotel/water park, country club-golf course, gated housing development which was planned to be built over three miles from any community infrastructure still lies in limbo.
Our county officials were drug into this mess after McGregor could not get an adjacent farmer to sell his property. Then the state's Vision Iowa Program bailed with their $5.2 million grant after they got very nervous while conducting a background investigation of the two developers and the resort's own feasibility studies.
Our rural county has spent at least $90,000 on the planning of this private development that we can track. Do understand that an agreement was signed in June of 2003 limiting county expenditure to a maximum of $75,000 on this project. Clayton County is now in the process of borrowing money to pay their big city attorney who had agreed earlier not to demand payment until the Tax Increment Financing bond was completed.
The casino corporation & their funding arm awarded a total of $35,000 that we know of. $42,620 of public tax money also has been paid to MSA Consulting of Dubuque for engineering fees for the Trail of Two Cities (Sidewalk to the Plastic House of Greed).
The Clayton County Board of Supervisors has stifled public debate on said subject matter and continues to violate their own laws, policies and agreements. Unfortunately these three gentlemen are in a corner they cannot seem to get out of and continue to "throw good money after bad."
Their own county attorney continues to distance himself from this mess after many earlier forewarnings. Many county employees have also expressed dismay at the government's role in RBR, LLC.
The county has recently passed the resort's preliminary plat which has blatant violations of our planning and zoning ordinances written into it. The cul-de-sacs lengths are in defiance as well as the development's lack of "open spaces."
There is also a huge "can of worms" brewing with the resort's plans and Chapter 403.22, Code of Iowa. These developers and the resort's owners, Peoples State Bank of Elkader, are frantically trying to get their mitts on a $20 million TIF bond. However the law which administers this type of financing was amended in 1996 which mandates low & moderate income housing assistance. Also, residential TIF bonds can only go out ten years not the twenty that the developers had asked for thus eroding their borrowing leverage.
From the conception of this glorious project we were told of the inclusion of a subsidized Assisted Living component. Do understand this federal program is highly lucrative to developers nationwide. However if federal monies are spent for urban sprawl development on farmland the Federal Farmland Protection Policy Act (FFPPA) comes into play.
Many environmental & cultural impact hoops must be jumped to pull this subsidy off in an unincorporated area. No drinking water or wastewater systems have ever been approved atop this highly porous geology.
As you may know the developers and their cheerleaders in McGregor filed a SLAPP lawsuit against our ad-hoc, non-profit citizen action group a while ago. Their argument is we have stymied the developers from building the resort by holding up public financing. However if they are not going to now utilize residential TIF bonding they can simply build using the bank's own monetary resources and that would make their legal claim against us moot.
Our informational website and its many links and pages may now easily be visited by simply going to the Google search engine and typing in River Bluff Resort Not! Thank you.
Oh, I almost forgot. These same developers last great project in Necedah, Wisconsin, The Oak Grove Resort, LLC recently filed bankruptcy in federal court thus avoiding foreclosure from the Staten Island Bank of New Jersey and tax collection sale from Juneau County.
Timothy Mason
McGregor, Iowa for The Concerned Citizens of Clayton County