Corporate Welfare Gone Wild

While Tacoma officials pioneered this poverty-generating development model, it is now a virus overtaking Pierce County and is potentially spreading statewide. In a race to the bottom, Lakewood and Puyallup have recently implemented similar tax breaks. Current government subsidies include:

• 8 and 10 year full tax breaks for new developments
• Low interest loans such as for converting the Winthrop to a five-start hotel and condo complex
• Over $60 million in free environmental clean-up for exclusive Thea Foss waterfront property
• Below-market rate land sales such as the downtown Marriott Courtyard Hotel
• Above-market rate land purchases such as bailing out the ill-fated Crosswater Condominium
• Eminent domain threats such as the "Tombstone" parking complex
• Free infrastructure like underground parking and utilities.

Who Does Rick Talbert really represent?

• At least 3 times, Mr. Talbert was a "no show, no call" at meetings with delegations of labor and community leaders to discuss this topic.
• Rather than explore common ground, Mr. Talbert has campaigned to defend the current tax, job, and housing scheme. In public forums, he has opposed standards such as living wages, union apprenticeships, and local resident access to jobs at these subsidized projects.
• Mr. Talbert publicly claims that the luxury property projects "won't pencil out" unless developers operate with poverty-wage non-union jobs and are not required to build a single affordable housing unit. This is the same thing developers said in scores of West Coast cities before proven wrong by working sustainable growth policies. Just like earlier bogus claims that these subsidized luxury projects benefit all residents, we want to see the data to support this claim.
• Mr. Talbert has run from informal approaches by old friends on this topic. Instead of chatting, Mr. Talbert indirectly accused one friend in an awkward professional setting of raising inappropriate topics
• Mr. Talbert claims to support urban density to reduce commuting but his scheme has people working far from homes they can afford and living in places far from the jobs that finance this high-end living. His plans are adding thousands more polluting commuters to our already clogged roads.

Job and Housing Crisis in Pierce County

For the last 3 years, Jobs with Justice has helped organize public forums hosted by our region's elected and community leadership to expose this crisis driven by a new low-wage service economy and property development scheme, local disinvestment and deindustrialization brought on by "free trade" treaties, broken immigration policies, and union-busting. Local governments have produced voluminous studies to identify and address this crisis. Even the pro-developer News Tribune admits to this crisis. As Tacoma Housing Authority Executive Director Michael Mirra says "if our local housing crisis was measured in food terms, we have widespread malnutrition and pockets of starvation." Development industry specialists agree that the local workforce is not paid enough to buy the newly built and soon over-saturated condos. When local workers at Tomlinson Linen, Alan Ritchey Inc, Toray Composites, Pierce County buildings, Marriott Hotels, Columbia Bank Building, and almost all local residential construction sites have to endure the scientific terrorism of the modern union-buster campaign to exercise their rights to organize for a living wage, we wonder how we reverse this crisis without worker-friendly elected leaders.

Time To Take Action

We have worked to build consensus around effective strategies to end this crisis among our region's elected and community leadership (see JwJ Workers Rights Board findings and resolution to act). Sometimes we need to reconcile the "consensus to act" with real action. These are the times JwJ mobilizes to hold decision-makers accountable.