Mayor Spencer Duncan
Members of the Topeka City Council
Interim City Manager Michael Webb
City of Topeka
215 SE 7th Street
Topeka, KS 66603
cc: Leigha Boling, Director of Economic Development
Dear Mayor Duncan, Councilmembers, and Interim City Manager Webb:
I am writing about the City’s continued reliance on a local “but-for” requirement for private RHID, TIF, and related incentive applications, and about who is being asked to administer and defend it.
The City’s own September 2026 housing study says Topeka needs 4,220 additional housing units over the next 20 years—roughly 210 units a year. Median home values rose 63% from 2019 to 2025. Rents are higher, inventory is tight, and the June 2026 Point-in-Time count still found 460 people experiencing homelessness in Topeka/Shawnee County. Against those numbers, the City has paid Columbia Capital Management approximately $1.85 million in municipal advisory and consulting fees across 95 invoices over more than a decade. Of that total, $136,500 was for RHID consulting on nine invoices covering projects that include Riverstone (Meier’s Place), Sherwood Village Park, Union at Tower District, Project View, 3D Homes, Johnson-Betts Meadows, and Windward Estates. Private applicants are required to fund the analysis under the City’s RHID policy (Resolution 9695 and earlier versions). The stated purpose is to show that, without the subsidy, the project could not proceed or could not meet the City’s housing goals.
In its October 2024 report *Estimating the Economic Impacts of Tax Increment Financing Districts* (R-24-012), the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit examined the same “but-for” concept. The auditors described it as an estimate of how likely it is that development would have occurred without the incentive. They stated that accurate estimation is very difficult and requires substantial amounts of data. They further concluded that whether development would have occurred in an individual district is an inherently unknowable question because it depends heavily on the private business decisions of the developers themselves. For those reasons they did not analyze the but-for percentage.
Kansas law does not require a but-for test for TIF, CID, or RHID. The City created the requirement as local policy.
Columbia Capital Management is a Merriam firm that provides municipal advisory and investment-management services to local governments. Jeff White, its Managing Member, spent more than a decade in local-government management (city manager, assistant city manager, department head, budget director) before joining the firm in 2001. He holds an MPA in Local Government Management. The firm is a registered municipal advisor and investment adviser; it is not a private real-estate developer. It has performed the financial analyses and but-for determinations the City requires.
Councilmember Karen Hiller has publicly supported retaining the but-for requirement. Her professional background is as executive director of Housing and Credit Counseling, Inc., a Topeka nonprofit focused on tenant-landlord counseling, homebuyer and consumer-credit education, budgeting, and advocacy, until her retirement in 2007. She has served on the Council since 2009 and has described herself as a policy wonk and budget hawk. That experience is relevant to housing counseling and neighborhood issues. It does not include underwriting private development projects, modeling private investment decisions, or performing the kind of counterfactual analysis the state’s auditors said is inherently unknowable.
Director Boling’s background is in city procurement, budgeting, grants management, and municipal transactions. She holds an MBA and is a Certified Public Manager. She now oversees economic-development incentives. That is public-sector administrative experience. It is not private-developer experience.
If the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit concluded that the core but-for question is inherently unknowable because it turns on private developer decisions the auditors could not reliably measure, on what basis does the City accept Columbia Capital’s determination of the same question? What specific private-developer insight or data does the City believe the firm possesses that the state’s nonpartisan auditors said does not exist in reliable form? And what in Councilmember Hiller’s or Director Boling’s professional backgrounds equips them to evaluate, endorse, or “sharpshoot” those determinations—or the private development decisions themselves?
The City’s own housing numbers show a real shortage. The process it has built requires private applicants to pay for an analysis the state’s auditors declined to perform because the counterfactual is unknowable. The people administering and defending that process are municipal advisors and long-time public-sector practitioners, not private developers.
I ask the Governing Body and staff to review Report R-24-012, the City’s RHID/TIF/CID policies, and the cumulative payments to Columbia Capital. Please explain why the City continues to require private applicants to fund a but-for analysis that the state’s own auditors treated as inherently unknowable, and why the current decision-makers are considered qualified to rely on or defend it.
I am available to discuss this. Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Henry McClure
MCRE, LLC
3625 SW 29th Street #100
Topeka, KS 66614
785-383-9994
mcre13@gmail.com
Henry McClure
Time kills deals
785-383-9994
www.henrymcclure.live
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