http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/11/11/what-ken-ham-isnt-telling-you-about-ark-encounter-funding/
What Ken Ham Isn’t Telling You About Ark Encounter Funding
To say the funding on Ken Ham‘s biblically themed Ark Encounter amusement park has been vague would be an understatement. After losing $18.25 million in sales tax incentives for discriminatory hiring, it seems clear why Answers in Genesis wouldn’t want Kentucky taxpayers to know what we dug up.
Last month, I attended a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce meeting where Ham and his Answers in Genesis board members were presenting the latest news and projections for their Ark Encounter project. Like most of us who have been monitoring the project funding, I was curious to catch some insight about the massive gap that exists between donations collected and total amount needed.
During the hour-long spiel that could best be described as an Ark Park pep rally, Ham rattled off hyped attendance projections and encouraged anyone with investment money to snatch up nearby commercial land. I learned that the construction was well under way in Williamstown, a rural area 45 minutes south of the Creation Museum, where the ministry had purchased 800 acres of land. He talked about the ark’s dimensions, the source of the timber being used, and other trivial notes — but barely touched on the topic of funding sources. Sandwiched somewhere in his tourism excitement, he breezed by the words “TIF district,” but said his lawyers really knew more than him, and quickly moved on. That’s when my ears perked up.
It wasn’t until the Q&A that an attendee asked if Ham could say more about the funding. Ham said the first phase of the project required $91.5 million before opening for business. To date, around $24 million has been raised in donations, an undisclosed amount has been made off of selling lifetime admission packages called “Boarding Passes,” and there’s $62 million in bond offerings. (Whether he had sold all those bonds wasn’t clear from his remarks.)
Around the time he debated Bill Nye on evolution in early 2014, Ken Ham was heavily pushing the sale of Ark bonds, and many speculated the timing of the debate was strategically coordinated to promote them. There were no follow ups at the recent event to say the bond sales were a success, and it remained a grey area for those of us trying to identify where the funding was coming from.
This is where the TIF comes in.
What is a TIF?
I myself was unfamiliar with TIF districts until a few weeks ago. But let me attempt a simple explanation: TIF stands for “Tax Increment Financing” and they’re usually issued in urban areas that are considered “blighted.” For example, suppose there was an abandoned shopping mall in a deteriorating community. A TIF can be set up to attract developers whose businesses may revitalize the area. The district officials could, for example, give the developers interest-free loans to build their project based on what they expect they can retrieve in property taxes over the next 30 years. That’s it. The developers don’t have to do anything differently from if they hadn’t been issued the TIFs at all. But now, rather than the property taxes going back to the community, the tax revenue is diverted to pay off the loan.
This can be a great help to the local economy if the development is a long-term success — it’s money well invested. The downside is, if the new developments fall short of projections (or fail entirely), the developers aren’t held liable for repayment and the burden of debt falls on the investors and taxpayers.
TIFs are controversial for a number of reasons and they’ve been discontinued in California, the first U.S. state to implement their use, because of the numerous lawsuits they led to (not to mention other unintended consequences).
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