| NEWS | Oops! from p 8 GPLET, it assumes the title of the prop- erty and leases it back to the developer for several years. The private project becomes government property, which takes it off the tax rolls. In the long run, the city profits by levying higher property taxes after a project is complete. The program has worked well for projects of public interest, such as community colleges, schools, and multi-family housing units. GPLETs target dense urban develop- ment where building and design costs are higher due to aging infrastructure and other factors that make investment risky and costly. But there is little public support behind high-rises like Skye on 6th and The Derby Roosevelt Row, the Amstar project. In 2020, the city admitted it would save Amstar more than $21 million in taxes, but claimed it would receive “no less than $36 million among other benefits,” court docu- ments show. That didn’t sway Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Christopher Coury, who ruled against Phoenix two months later. In fact, Coury questioned in his ruling whether GPLETs would be viable in any capacity in Arizona again. “This judicial officer questions whether the death knell for the GPLET’s usefulness has rung,” Coury wrote. The city of Phoenix had 30 days to appeal Coury’s decision. No appeal was ever filed. “By not appealing, the city avoided the possibility of an adverse statewide prece- dent,” Joe Setyon, a spokesperson for the Goldwater Institute, told New Times. Because the 2020 lawsuit challenged the specific GPLET to Amstar and not the constitutionality of GPLETs generally, there is nothing stopping the same plain- tiffs from challenging a different GPLET for Hubbard Street Group, said Olen Lenets, a land use litigator with Rose Law Group in Scottsdale. He’s sure the city of Phoenix has every reason to believe it can be successful in defending against the claims brought against it. The two cases are not as identical as they appear, he asserted. “While the parties in the 2020 and 2022 lawsuits may be the same, the underlying facts appear to be different,” Lenets told New Times. “If I successfully sue you for negligence because you hit me with your car in 2020, and make the same allegation in 2022 based on a new, separate instance of alleged negligence, you have every right and opportunity to defend against my new negligence claim.” However, he added, had the 2020 verdict concluded that all GPLETs are unconstitutional, there would probably be some concerns for the parties in the new lawsuit over a subsequent GPLET. The March of Progress Amstar anticipated a 7 percent profit margin for the Derby with the help of a subsidy from the city. But the company predicted it could make a profit of 6 percent without it, and the project forged ahead after the tax break was ruled illegal. Hubbard Street Group estimates that it would make at least a 5.56 percent profit from the Hubbard Project without the GPLET lease and tax abatement, according to legal documents. The developer esti- mates that the profit on the Hubbard Project will increase by less than 1 percent as a consequence of the GPLET lease and tax abatement. The city did not dispute those numbers. In 2016, city officials said no high-rise developer would touch the aging and damaged Circles Records building, near Central Avenue and McKinley Street, without a GPLET. Empire Group, a local developer that had plans to build a mixed-use residential development on the site, had conversations with the city about obtaining a GPLET. It never did, yet that project forged ahead successfully, too. “High-rises want to come to Phoenix,” Riches said. “These things are going to go up anyway. The market decides, not the city.” Phoenix-based historic preservationist Stacey Champion started an online petition during that controversy, urging the city of Phoenix not to grant Empire the tax break, and several hundred people signed it. Six years later, she remembers it all vividly. Phoenix passes out GPLETs “like candy favors,” Champion told New Times. Downtown Phoenix wouldn’t be littered with vacant lots and derelict build- ings without the commercial development program, agreed Champion and Riches, who have a history of being at odds with each other on local issues. The GPLET is more of a want than a need for high-rise developers, they claim, as evident by the marginal profit differential between projects that received a subsidy and those that did not. Large, wealthy out- of-state developers dominate the pool of successful applicants, “supported by big- name attorneys who called in favors to get them,” Champion said. “If people believe that the free market works, then they should let the free market work.” This storyline unfolds amid an unprece- The Condemned Arizona executes Clarence Dixon. BY KATYA SCHWENK eight years. Clarence Dixon was sentenced to death A more than a decade ago for the murder of 21-year-old Deana Bowdoin, an Arizona State University student who was found strangled and stabbed in her home in 1978. It took decades for Dixon, 66, to even be iden- tified as a suspect in Bowdoin’s death. His last appeal, to the U.S. Supreme Court, was rejected less than an hour before his death sentence was carried out in a state prison in Florence. Dixon was executed with pentobarbital, a lethal drug that the state spent years trying to obtain. According to media witnesses of 10 t 10 o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, May 11, Arizona carried out its first execution in nearly his death, all went mostly to plan, although it took 25 minutes to hook up the intravenous needle. Minutes after the drugs were injected, at 10:19 a.m., Dixon appeared to stop breathing. He was pronounced dead at 10:30 a.m.. Leslie James, Bowdoin’s sister, told the press after Dixon’s death she believed justice had been served. “This is finality for this process. It’s relief. It was way too long,” she said. Before his final appearance, Dixon asked for Kentucky Fried Chicken and a half-pint of strawberry ice cream. In the execution chamber, Arizona Department of Corrections Dixon didn’t appear to experi- ence pain, witnesses said. He did make several comments to the doctors as they prepared him. “You’re being as thorough as possible as you try to kill me,” he said, according to the account of Troy Hayden, a news anchor with Fox 10. “You worship death, don’t you?” His last words, just after the injection had begun, were: “Maybe I’ll see you on the other side, Deana. I don’t know you and I don’t remember you.” Dixon and his attorneys spent the last several weeks appealing his execution in state in federal courts and before the state clemency board. The team of lawyers has argued that Dixon’s history of mental illness should disqualify him from the death penalty. His attorneys, last week, pursued that argu- ment all the way up to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then the U.S. Supreme Court. Relief was denied both times. “Clarence Dixon has suffered from para- noid schizophrenia for decades and has delusions surrounding his upcoming execu- tion,” wrote Eric Zuckerman, one of Dixon’s attorneys, in a statement last week. He argued an execution would violate the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. Dixon’s lawyers also argued that Dixon was never competent to stand trial, that the clemency board was unfairly stacked with law enforcement officials, and that the state could not use lethal drugs that had outlived their shelf life. None of the efforts could keep Dixon out of the execution chamber. Dixon’s death likely won’t be the last this year. On May 3, the state issued a death warrant for another man on death row, Frank Atwood. He has less than a month left to live. dented housing crisis in Phoenix. “Had the city only been incentivizing real affordable housing developments instead of luxury high-rises and settling for peanuts from out-of-state developers, perhaps we wouldn’t currently have thou- sands of people living on our city streets,” Champion said. “We have literally been screaming about that for the past 10 years.” But according to a Phoenix City Council agenda from September 2020, at least 10 percent of the units in Skye on 6th will be designated for workforce housing. The development is expected to “create approximately 264 construction jobs and 77 permanent jobs,” according to the agenda. Hubbard Street Group made a $100,000 contribution to affordable housing efforts in the city, and pledged to make annual donations of $2,000 each to Phoenix Elementary School District and the Phoenix Union High School District for each year of the eight-year lease. “My clients thought the city would appreciate it,” said Nick Wood, Hubbard Street Group’s attorney. However, according to court documents, “The payments to the Phoenix Elementary School District and Phoenix Union High School District are intended to ‘compensate’ the school districts for tax revenue they would otherwise receive had the city not provided to the developer the >>p 14 MAY 19TH– MAY 25TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
