Oakland council frittered away $400,000 on nonprofit

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Perhaps the members of the Oakland City Council should be required to take a basic course in public financing, because some of them clearly don’t understand how it works.

Based on nothing more than goodwill and good wishes, city officials doled out $400,000 to a nonprofit so that it could study whether to build a transit village at the Coliseum BART Station in Oakland. According to a Chronicle story by Rachel Swan, the nonprofit was set up by Oakland Councilman Larry Reid, and others, and it’s clear the city doesn’t really expect to get paid back.

The City Council gave the nonprofit, which calls itself the Oakland Economic Development Corp., extremely generous — laughable, if this weren’t so disgusting — terms: 55 years to pay it back, and no payment required until the housing project the nonprofit is supposed to build begins generating revenue.

And that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, because it doesn’t look like anything’s going to get built.

The great moments of Blue America.