Posted inDowntown Urban Renewal

How downtown Salem is coming alive. But could be livelier.

Here's the considerably delayed second installment of my May 19 blog post about a City Club program regarding progress in redeveloping Salem's downtown area. That post showed slides of the planned conversion of the Truitt Brothers cannery into a vibrant mixed use development. Now I'll share slides presented by Shelly Ehenger, Urban Development Program Manager for the City of Salem. Ehenger started off by showing the boundary of the Downtown Urban Renewal Area, where leveraging of property tax assessments can be used to promote improvements. She noted that the cannery isn't part of that area, but there are other ways…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem T.J. Sullivan

City of Salem pays $3.5 million for vacant property near riverfront. Why?

Since I don't watch City of Salem Urban Renewal meetings on You Tube (got to save my time for Succession), until today I wasn't aware that the Urban Renewal board, which is the City Council under another name, had approved paying $3.5 million for 1.14 acres of property near the riverfront. The property is marked with a red star. The triangular Park Front building is above it. The South Park apartments are below it. Riverfront Park is to the left of it. As I'll describe below, this seems like a questionable thing to do. In fact, it strikes me as…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem T.J. Sullivan

Disturbing facts revealed about $749,000 Park Front urban renewal grant

After making a public records request to the City of Salem for documents related to approval of the $749,000 Park Front LLC grant, and reviewing what I got, I'm even more disturbed by how this grant request was handled -- which relates to how Downtown Urban Renewal funds are being handled in general. The easiest way to read this post is via an Adobe Spark web page I've fashioned. The images are larger on that web page, and copies of the documents are a bit easier to download and view. Just click below. Alternatively, scroll down and continue reading the…
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Posted inChuck Bennett T.J. Sullivan Urban Renewal

Salem Business Journal publishes my urban renewal “crony capitalism” story

"If you can write an Urban Renewal story by tomorrow noon, I will run it in the January Business Journal." This was the good news part of a reply I received from Bruce Taylor, publisher of the Salem Business Journal, after asking him via email if he was interested in a story about problems with the City of Salem's urban renewal agency.  I was pleased to get Bruce's positive response. The bad news part was, I read his message about five hours after he sent it, having been totally absorbed until about 8:30 pm in watching the mesmerizing men's basketball…
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Posted inT.J. Sullivan Urban Renewal

Urban renewal crony capitalism is alive and well in Salem (may it die soon)

Last night the Salem Urban Renewal Agency board, which is just the City Council by another name, approved a $749,000 grant to T.J. Sullivan for his Park Front office building. Nine days ago I called this "crony capitalism" in a blog post written after Sullivan's application came to light. Nothing I saw at yesterday's meeting changed my mind.  Here's a video of my testimony, which includes an interchange between Councilor Jim Lewis and me. I'll share the text of what I said at the end of this post. My central points were based on two indisputable facts: (1) The City of…
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