The Syracuse Common Council held what they were calling a public info session on the mall expansion last night at Henninger High School. It was, instead, primarily a misinformation shouting match (story).

We were told at the outset that during the day, an appeals court had scheduled a hearing on an eminent domain taking of some mall tenants' leases for September 14 – a ruling that will probably hold up the process somewhat.

The speaking audience was primarily in favor of the project, though for quite a few of the wrong reasons (we'll get to them below). I rather figured this would happen, as the 'for' contingent is fairly organized – some 200 former workers for Destiny USA who were laid off when it turned out they were hired mainly for show, and the businesses that have been working in some capacity as contractors with Pyramid (the mall owner) for the past decade or so.

The 'against' contingent, however, is a group of primarily emotional people, some of whom can't get up in front of a television camera without company approval – which kept them from speaking.

Here are some of the arguments (with counter-arguments) for the project we heard last night:

• Vote for Destiny; I need my job back. The Council is not being asked to approve Destiny. This was made very clear when settlement talks started. It's a mall expansion. It takes an exisiting large mall, adds a smaller mall, a 1,000-room hotel, and then another small mall. This is not the mammoth theme park-type thing called Destiny USA. In fact, Pyramid has been very keen on making sure we know this is a "Carousel Center expansion."
  
  One Carousel Center maintenance worker, a 63-year-old woman, said it was her life's dream to be able to buy a car, and that her job at the mall has finally allowed her to do that. Honestly, great, but I know I'm not living in a city full of people who want to get no further in life than buying a car. Some of us would like to eliminate the need for them altogether. [And an interesting aside: The drawings handed out at the meeting put the parking lot to this expansion about 3/4 of a mile from the mall, so after driving to work, this lady would still need to hop on a bus to get to the building. Why not cut out the middle man?]
• A $60 million annual PILOT payment is better than the $0 annually promised in a 2002 contract. Maybe, but the PILOT money can go toward paying back investors. Even money guaranteed to the city is way under what the property tax assessment would be, and, as more than one person pointed out last night, none of the money goes to schools. ShoppingTown Mall, in DeWitt, pays property taxes, and the Jamesville-DeWitt schools get about $1 million in revenue from the mall. The much larger Carousel Center, however, puts no money at all in Syracuse schools' coffers.
• Small businesses are bad for the city because they're unstable. I don't think you'll actually find a city official anywhere in the country who would agree – even in towns full of strip-mall development, it's the independent, locally-owned businesses that show a community is thriving.
• My property taxes are too high, and the money promised to the city will help alleviate them. Nowhere in the settlement agreement is there a request for an ordinance to keep property taxes flat. And the PILOT money guaranteed to the city will be less than the property tax assessment. If Carousel were on the tax rolls, there would be a lot more property tax income – and if the expansion does roll south to Bear Street, it takes a lot of houses and small businesses off the tax rolls.
• All the naysayers are misrepresenting what Destiny is. Again, the council is not being asked to approve Destiny. But if this is going to be such a public project, why don't we have enough information to know exactly what this is going to be?
• I want a better future for my kids. Angela scribbled down something rather accurate: Working at The Gap? Really. Or maybe they can get maintenance jobs and fulfill their life-long goals of buying a car.

Notably absent from the supporters' arguments were previous assertions that the wealth would flow into downtown. Lawyers and architects locally said they would benefit, but it appears that no one is under the illusion anymore that people will actually leave the mall to shop and eat downtown.

A notable against argument: Developer Robert Congel, with whom the city would be contracting on this, is due in court Oct. 3. His former business partners at other malls are suing him for some $100 million. Does the city really want to contract with this guy before we see what this is all about?

If this giant mall expansion is going to happen, it needs to be without the city's blessing.