"To protect City and minimize fiscal impact, a revenue guarantee should be included in the proposed development agreement"

The headline is from a fiscal analysis presentation to Palo Alto City Council today by the experts it hired to analyze the fiscal impact of the Stanford Medical Center expansion.  The idea is to ensure the risk of insufficient revenues from the expansion is transferred away from taxpayers and to the applicant, Stanford. (Also discussed here.)

This idea is striking because we proposed a similar thing in Coyote Valley, where a ridiculous fiscal analysis assumed steady growth in housing values and therefore rosy revenues.  We suggested the developers bear the risks if things somehow didn't work out.  The whole project broke down before we could see if developers would put their own money where their mouths are, but it's interesting to see someone else come up with a similar idea.

-Brian Schmidt