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G.A.R. chooses Ray Sunday Student Award winners

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Christmas program to be held at the Second Presbyterian Church

<p>No one can accuse Wilkes-Barre City officials of never thinking through matters that affect taxpayers.</p><p>&#8220;WB honors 31-year-old contract to sell land,&#8221; appeared the side-splitting headline a week ago in the Times Leader. After three decades, the sale finally went through Dec. 3.</p><p>This story would have been right at home on the comic pages.</p><p>Back in 1984, the city agreed to sell a piece of land to Gus Genetti, who owns the Best Western Plus Genetti Hotel &amp; Conference Center across the street from City Hall. Nothing wrong with that, except city officials over the years and years and years never bothered to finalize the sale until this month. And, as if the council members didn&#8217;t already take their good nature time doing so, the sale was &#8220;a last-minute addition to council&#8217;s regularly-scheduled public meeting,&#8221; the TL reported. Obviously, the city needed to work out a few remaining kinks.</p><p>Luckily, it passed unanimously; otherwise, it might have taken decades more to seal the deal.</p><p>Apparently, Genetti couldn&#8217;t wait forever for the city to keep its promise and sell him the .77-acre parcel near his hotel, so he built a parking lot on it. He just didn&#8217;t pay taxes all those years because he technically didn&#8217;t own the parcel.</p><p>Welcome to the club. A lot of institutions in the cash-strapped city don&#8217;t pay taxes. Among them are the nonprofit hospitals which overcharge for just about everything, including a &#8220;facilities fee&#8221; in which patients must actually pay for the room in which their procedures are performed, proving nonprofits can get pretty creative in their billing practices. Some of them even get to determine what they&#8217;ll pay in lieu of taxes. We should all be so lucky.</p><p>Then there are all the KOZ designations throughout the city, the latest being the desperately-needed $28 million hotel and convention center, which will be built on South Main Street and receive 10 years of tax breaks. It&#8217;s nice to believe, but does anyone really think Wilkes-Barre will be among the top destination choices for conventions? Is anyone else curious why a company from India wants to build a 10-story hotel here?</p><p>Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to worry about inevitable tax increases when the Wilkes-Barre Area School District builds a new $75 million plus high school on North Washington Street and when Gov. Tom Wolf and state lawmakers decide whether to raise our income taxes or hike the state sales tax from 6 to 7.25 percent.</p><p>Last we heard, Luzerne County was eyeing its own slice of taxpayer pie by considering an 8 percent tax increase to cover, among other things, health care costs for employees who pay a pittance toward their costly family plans. Thankfully, some council members identified enough budget cuts to possibly spare us &#8211; at least for next year.</p><p>Back to the Genetti deal. After 31 unbelievable years, Genetti was able to purchase the land for $75,000 after using it to his advantage for all those years. Who can blame him, though, if city officials allowed him to occupy it tax free?</p><p>Mayor Tom Leighton said Genetti approached him recently after the city resolved its long-standing litigation over properties owned by &#8220;the defunct&#8221; city redevelopment authority. I must have missed the news story where the debt-ridden city redevelopment authority went out of business.</p><p>If only someone could get the ball rolling to terminate the useless Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority, another quasi-governmental agency where everything it touches turns to decay. The Market Street train wreck complex comes to mind.</p><p>Leighton said even though the Genetti parking lot &#8220;technically&#8221; and &#8220;legally&#8221; belonged to the city, Genetti &#8220;made significant improvements on the land the city was supposed to convey back in 1984, 85, 86, whenever that year was.&#8221;</p><p>So the city lost tax revenue for 31, 30, or 29 years. Whatever.</p><p>When Councilman George Brown raised a question, Genetti said he had been paying the city an amount in lieu of taxes but stopped that years ago. Luckily for him, no one in the city stopped him from stopping that.</p><p>Genetti pointed out, &#8220;Right now, it&#8217;s tax exempt. It&#8217;s owned by the city.&#8221; He said he&#8217;s made $100,000 in improvements on the city-owned land, which is now his. And the city benefited from these improvements, how? He also said he built his hotel in 1979 without any city, county or state assistance unlike the former Sheraton Crossgates, which he said received a $1.6 million loan plus 200 free parking spaces in perpetuity at the city Parking Authority&#8217;s adjacent parking garage.</p><p>Really? Just who is the city parking authority to give away public parking spaces to a private entity?</p><p>Then again, how dare the city allow anyone to occupy city property without paying taxes on it for 31 years? Or 30. Or 29.</p><p>What the heck? It&#8217;s only tax money &#8212; and you can&#8217;t take it with you.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Roccograndi </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/web1_Roccograndi-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Roccograndi </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Betty Roccograndi</p><p>Zeroing In</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Betty Roccograndi is a Wyoming Valley resident and an award-winning journalist. Her &#8220;Zeroing In&#8221; column appears every Sunday in the Times Leader.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Zeroing In: After 31 years, Gus Genetti officially owns a parking lot