City Council's Handing Out Money Today

We're in the midst of a staff meeting, but The News' Rudy Bush, of course, is at City Hall keeping tabs on the council's doings. And this morning, he offers two updates on items that first appeared on Unfair Park. First off: The council unanimously approved to give Deloitte LLP the $2 million it wanted to stay downtown after it threatened earlier this year to hightail all of its local operations to Irving. According to The News's City Hall reporter, Ann Margolin said, "The economic model is very conservative and shows over 10 years the employees should bring about $8 million to the city."

But Margolin wasn't so fond of the idea to give Forest City almost $18 million extra in tax incentives to redo the Continental Building -- which, you may recall, was part of the package way back when then-Mayor Laura Miller went to bat for the Cleveland-based developer on behalf of the Mercantile. Rudy writes that Mayor Tom Leppert thinks the city needs to cover what the private sector can't ... yet. As in, "Clearly, we're dealing with some challenges that weren't invested in long ago. We're trying to kick start that."