Some Questions About 6th and Jackson…

Read the full transcript of the video below:

Alright. Let’s talk about development. 

How’s it going y’all. My name is Aiden Anderson and this is the Moscow Minutes. Got an interesting topic to cover here today. Last week, the Moscow-Pullman Daily news put out an article talking about some roadblocks that the developer of the property located at the corner of 6th and Jackson has encountered. I’ll be quoting from the article here:

“[Carly] Lilly and George Skandalos, both Moscow business owners, were selected by the [Urban Renewal] agency last summer to bring their idea of a mixed-use building to life. However, Lilly said that the cost to prepare that land for construction is “rendering it a non-viable project.”

The most challenging issue is the soil underneath that Sixth and Jackson street corner. It is not stable enough to support the weight of a four-to-five-story building that she and Skandalos envisioned.”

The article states this later on, and again I’m quoting:

“Lilly said they were not made aware of the soil issue when they were previously selected by the urban renewal agency to develop Sixth and Jackson street in 2015. During this second attempt, it was not until they partnered with their construction and design teams that they were informed about these problems.

“This has been investigated and remediated and managed and inspected so many times that we thought, ‘Well, certainly it’s buildable.’ ” she said.

Lilly said there is a chance that a three-story structure may be profitable enough to pursue building. Lilly and Skandalos will meet with their design team again to explore this option. The urban renewal agency will discuss this at its upcoming meeting in February.

Agency officials appeared open to the idea of rerouting Hello Walk to make development easier. They are also considering seeking funding to cover the expenses of preparing the site for construction.”

Ok. So developers are experiencing unexpected issues with a property and are looking for opportunities for government funding. Pretty run of the mill as things go, right? Not exactly.

Let’s back up a bit. The Urban Renewal Agency (URA) is a quasi-government agency. It receives local property tax monies related to the urban renewal district (which in moscow is essentially the downtown), and uses it for various urban infrastructure projects. The property at 6th and Jackson is one such project that has been on their minds for a long time.

One of the first studies regarding the property’s poor soil condition was conducted back in 2013. Meeting minutes recorded back in August of 2015 record the URA’s previous efforts to remediate the soil, and the minutes of a meeting April 6th, 2017, details the URA’s closeout of the remediation process and the conveying of the property to the Sangria Group.

Who is the Sangria Group, you ask? The very folks in charge of present development: Carly Lily and George Skandalos.

An email chain from later in April 2017, the same April in which the property was conveyed to the Sangria group, shows some discussion between Skandalos and Lily regarding the known soil issues. The “bill” mentioned in this email is Bill Belknap, current Moscow City Supervisor and a member of the URA at the time these emails were written.

If Skandalos and Lily have been involved with this project off and on since 2017, and by their own emails were aware of the soil issues when they first got involved, why are they quoted in the newspapers as having been “not made aware of the soil issues” and not informed until now? On top of that, they’re asking for funding to help take care of this supposedly unexpected problem.

It’s one thing for a developer to ask for public funding to help solve a problem. It’s another thing for a developer to include in their request for funding a reason that at best demonstrates unpreparedness (you should know what you’re getting into), and at worst demonstrates a blatant falsehood (why say that you were unaware of problems when the record clearly shows otherwise).

Another question that arises is financial in nature. If discussions taking place at City Hall and the County Courthouse are in any way informative, then it seems to me that neither entity is particularly flexible when it comes to spending cash. The URA has already been pretty stringent when it comes to other developers who’ve attempted projects on the 6th and Jackson property. The Hello Walk mentioned in the Moscow Pullman Daily article comes to mind. So it would seem inconsistent with their previous policy to roll out the red carpet for Skandalos and Company when the entities that support them are even more financially constricted than usual. Would a change in policy not in fact demonstrate preferential treatment by the URA? And what are the standards by which such treatment would be justified?

Those are just a couple questions I would ask of this project. Personally, I’d think it quite helpful if the developers or the URA clarified what’s going on, because the newspaper article leaves much up in the air. Regardless, the work on the 6th and Jackson property has been nearly a year in the making, and so whatever happens with the property, Skandalos, Lily, and the URA, the citizens of Moscow and Latah County ought to be paying attention to it.

I’m Aiden Anderson, and this is the Moscow Minutes. See you next time.