Trib Skewers Lebo Project

From today's Tribune Review:

Lance: To Mt. Lebanon officials. They continue to toy with a wacky idea to give a developer millions in taxpayer dollars -- through a tax-increment-financing package -- to help him build some very tony condominiums on a tract of land that government control has kept off the tax rolls for three decades.

The developer says that without the $4.5 million subsidy for condos that will have an average sale price of nearly half-a-million dollars, he'll lose money. Hello! That's the marketplace saying it can't support the project. So why should taxpayers? There's a highly technical term for this -- Daffy Duck economics.

Mt. Lebanon can do better. A good place to start would be to have the parking authority that controls the property sell it.

And earlier this week, the Trib's news coverage of the Zamagias project.