🌎 Resumen en español · traducción automática
When the Urban County Council expanded the Red Mile’s tax-increment-financing district on June 4 — in a nine-day sprint to beat a state deadline, with no debate and not one member of the public at the microphone — this newspaper reported that the one number a taxpayer would most want to know was absent from every budget document: how much the 2010 subsidy had actually paid out. Kentucky’s annual TIF reports list only the authorized ceilings, never the year-by-year checks. We wrote that the figure existed only behind open-records requests, and that the article would be updated when the records came.
They have come. In response to an open-records request, the Kentucky Department of Revenue — the agency that signs the checks — produced its annual increment letters for the Red Mile. For the first time, here is what the Commonwealth has actually handed over.
$2.16 million in five years
From 2020 through 2024, the state released $2,163,369.59 in increment to the project — its share of the new property, payroll-withholding and sales taxes generated inside the district, routed back to reimburse the development instead of flowing to the state’s general fund. The year-by-year figures, taken from the Revenue Department’s own final calculation letters:…