You gotta be kiddin’ me.
The Redgate/Kane Company? An “honest, ethical developer” who has “not acted in bad faith at all”? (T. Stephen McCarthy, “McIntyre fiasco responsibility rests with city, not private developer,” Letters to the Editor, Portsmouth Herald, 1/24/23.) I guess there must be two “Redgate/Kane” companies running around here, for the one referred-to by Mr. McCarthy is certainly not the one I know.
Redgate/Kane has been doing its best to bamboozle the city–usually successfully–ever since the city announced that it was looking for a suitable development partner to redevelop the McIntyre Building. A very early example was Kane’s original proposal, which provided that the $100,000 annual ground lease payments that had been a central feature of the parties’ financial arrangement would become payable just as soon as the building achieved 95% occupancy following the completion of Redgate/Kane’s renovations.
I personally protested this devious proposal both loudly and publicly via a letter to the editor which appeared in the 12/27/18 edition of the Portsmouth Herald. Here, in part, is what I wrote:
“Michael Kane must think that our city officials are a bunch of fools and suckers. And if our city councilors and city planners fall for this scam, then he’s absolutely right.”
Nothing that has happened since that time has caused me to change my opinion.
For the benefit of those who were not following the matter closely at the time, the problem with Redgate/Kane’s proposal was that attainment of the 95% occupancy threshold was simply never going to happen. Not in my lifetime, at least. Even in the best of times, it normally takes a year or two for a new commercial or mixed-use building to reach even a 50% or 60% occupancy rate, even if the owner-landlord is using his best efforts, and Kane certainly had no incentive to hasten the day when its $100,000/yr. lease obligation would be triggered. Whether through natural market forces, intentional manipulation, or some combination of the two, it would likely have been decades before Kane would be required to begin making its $100,000 lease payments–if indeed ever. Fortunately, the city did not fall for this scam.
A leopard doesn’t change his spots, and Redgate/Kane hasn’t changed its tactics. For the latest rundown, just read the suit papers in the lawsuit that the city recently filed against Redgate/Kane (now known as SoBow Square), and read the latest couple of months’ worth of Portsmouth Herald articles, as well as the numerous online comments thereto.
Mr. McCarthy is also way off base in blaming the members of the prior City Council (known derisively to their detractors as “the Becksted 5”) for the city’s present predicament. You may have noticed that the current City Council–the “Progress Portsmouth 9,” or, if you prefer, “the Boondoggle 9”–fared no better in negotiating with Redgate/Kane than did the prior council led by former mayor Rick Becksted, even after the new council paid $2 million to Kane in order to start over again with a clean slate and begin the negotiations afresh.
In blaming the Becksted 5 for the McIntyre debacle, Mr. McCarthy has targeted the wrong villains. He and the rest of the Becksted council’s critics can thank the “Blalock 8”–former mayor Jack Blalock and the seven other city councilors who usually voted with him as a block, frequently over the dissenting vote of then-city councilor Rick Becksted–for this mess. They were the ones who entered into a Faustian bargain with Redgate/Kane and sold the city’s soul to the latter in exchange for a sweetheart deal which amounted to a straight giveaway to the developer. In voting to terminate the development agreement with the latter, former mayor Becksted and the four other right-minded city councilors merely tried to undo the damage and to stop the bleeding, after the situation had become intolerable.
The lesson to be learned is that, with an alternate and better proposal having been presented by developer Bill Binnie, the city should have avoided Redgate/Kane like the plague. It is unfortunate that the current council did not learn that lesson from the Becksted council’s experience. Why is it that the Becksted 5 were able to see it, but the Progress Portsmouth 9 weren’t?
Duncan J. MacCallum
