Tag: Traffic

I feel a little threatened, actually, by the stadium proposal

Letter to Editor:

I watched the public hearing on Senate Bill 2692 on April 2, 2024. My takeaway, the way they made me feel, is that Everett is doomed if we don’t let them build a soccer stadium. Everyone else has given up on us. Only Bob Kraft can save us. I honestly believe that is the way they want us to feel. I also believe they don’t want us to THINK about it at all. Our mayor talked about shrinking revenues from industrial/commercial taxes. Our state Senator talked about how we can’t stand to look at those smokestacks for one more minute, they’re so ugly. Encore said they owned the parcel but had no intention of doing anything with it. Some Krafty person or other said they weren’t putting in a lot of parking, so it supposedly wasn’t going to make traffic worse. I guess he’s never heard of Uber.

This is all very reminiscent of the runup to the casino. ‘Nobody else is going to clean up the site.’ ‘It will help keep taxes low.’ ‘Good jobs for everyone!’ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I didn’t hear anybody ask the hard questions.

Why has our tax base eroded so badly? Well, for starters, our agreements with Wynn/Encore have meant that Encore pays an artificially low PILOT+. While other cities were courting light industrial business and R&D, Everett was courting developers of look-alike mega apartment complexes; the residential tax rate is lower, so less revenue.

What about flooding? If the mayor wants to spend millions of dollars for barriers so that Island End doesn’t flood, isn’t the stadium parcel at risk, too? If we let Kraft build there and the stadium has a catastrophic flood, is he going to sue the city for letting him build there? We can’t afford that.