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It is not 15 years ago.
That was about the time that Epic was taking off as a business and also looking to take off and move to the suburbs. The company wound up in Verona at a huge, sprawling campus there. There are those in Madison city government who can’t quite shake that experience. They should.
The current city administration is falling all over itself at the thought that Exact Sciences, what could be the next Epic, might move downtown into the Judge Doyle Square mega-development. That would be good, but it’s not life or death for the downtown, which will continue to be plenty healthy regardless. And, in fact, the Doyle Square location, while somewhat exciting at first blush, is not ideal for Exact Sciences.
First, a comment or two on process. The city has put itself in a terrible negotiating position with two mistakes.
First, it dismissed the other development groups that responded to its request for proposals and announced that it would work exclusively with the JDS/Majestic group, which is proposing a deal that includes a home for Exact Sciences, a hotel to serve Monona Terrace (a long-term goal of the city), parking and more. The smarter move would have been to keep all parties in play longer to put more pressure on JDS to come up with a better deal for city taxpayers.
The second mistake was to buy in to JDS’s timeline.
The developers are saying that Exact Sciences wants to be in its new headquarters by 2017 and have put the city on notice that they want a building permit by the end of this year. That puts city decision makers and staff on an incredibly short timeline to iron out all the many moving details in this very complicated deal. For example, the developers want no less than 15 exemptions from city TIF policies and a $12 million direct grant to Exact Sciences, something the city has never done for any employer before and is reminiscent of troubles that recently surfaced at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. The city needs to take a long, hard look at all this, but by accepting the developers’ timeline they gave them the upper hand and put city analysis at a disadvantage right from the start.
In short, the city has made itself look desperate and desperation is always a bad posture for negotiation.
Beyond process, this is not a good combination of uses on this site. It detracts from the city’s legitimate primary objective: more hotel rooms to benefit the taxpayer-owned Monona Terrace convention center.
Moreover, though Exact Sciences has every reason to want to be where the action is, they should reconsider Judge Doyle Square. As currently proposed this is an incredibly difficult and complicated deal because there’s so much going into it. They would be better off looking for a site in the East Washington Avenue corridor where a more simple and straightforward deal could be made but where all the excitement of downtown is still present. They could probably get into offices quicker and with less cost by going just east of the Square.
Finally there’s the issue of the subsidy itself. Exact Sciences should want to be downtown and should be willing to pay the premium for those amenities with little or no taxpayer help. No doubt they’re looking at the experience of Epic, where very few of their young employees want to live near the antiseptic suburban Epic campus. They all want to live in downtown Madison. The impact is so well known that it is often referred to among developers as “the Epic effect.” Much of the quality rental housing you see going up in the downtown is built with these very employees in mind. Exact Sciences looks at this and thinks it wants to be where its employees will want to be. Yes, you can get cheap parking in the suburbs, but you can’t get downtown Madison and everything it has to offer. Exact Sciences should just recognize that and pay for it because it’s more than worth it.
The smart thing for the city to do would be to work with Exact Sciences on finding a location for them elsewhere downtown and to reopen negotiations with all the respondents to the Judge Doyle RFP. Then allow city officials to take the appropriate amount of time to make solid decisions in the public interest.
