Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
Bottom line is that they are giving TIF investment lots of credit for causation they cannot and have not even tried to prove.

Classic violation of the statistical axiom, "Correlation does not imply causation". In other words, they are saying that TIF money has caused all this private development and increased property value but cannont show any direct causation. They have no way of knowing if all that would have happened with or without TIF, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise, as they always do.
It looks to me that the City is assuming that projects where it directly awards TIF money would not happen without the public assistance (I suppose whether you agree with that proposition depends on your thoughts about how rigorous the City's vetting process is for those applications), and that things that happen without direct TIF assistance are only partially due to public investment. Or at least that's how I interpret the 50/50 and 25/75 splits with taxing entities for what the two plans in the presentation calls "indirect" increment. In fact, one could argue that by reducing the split from 50/50 in downtown to 25/75 in Core to Shore, the City is admitting that public investment will not cause as much of the growth there as it believes it has in downtown.