Millionaire developer Ellie Kassab is raising controversy in Vancouver again. Now he has approached the city council asking for a tax break for his planned 92 unit apartment complex he desires to build on the soon to be torn down site of the Mill Plan downtown Burgerville.

According to Kassab, his multi-million dollar project “won’t pencil out” unless city council agrees to “limit property tax assessments to the land beneath his proposed 92-unit apartment complex and its ground-floor commercial spaces, while allowing him to forego taxes on the upper three stories of the buildings for the next 12 years.”

How many homeowners in Vancouver or Clark County would like a deal like that to help with their homes in today’s economic downturn?

Kassab, it should be remembered, caused a stir in town back in April 2007 when he purchased the old Police Station for a measly $200,000, while the median price for single family homes in Vancouver was $260,000.

How was he able to buy “a half block of downtown, including a multistory building” for less than the median price of a home?

According to former Columbian writer, Jeffery Mize in his May 9, 2007 article “Closer look: City building sale – Prestige Plaza site price explained,” Kassab and the city “negotiated the value.”

According to Mize’s article, “PGP Valuation Inc. of Vancouver appraised the property at $170,000. If the city cleared the site and removed hazardous materials, such as asbestos tiles and lead-based paint, the property would be worth $600,000.”

Three years earlier, former Clark County Assessor Linda Franklin appraised it at $3.8 Million using what they call the “cost approach,” which is “how much it would cost to rebuild the current structure and not how much the property is worth for redevelopment purposes.”

That was the official explanation given, make of it or take it as you wish. Burgerville wasn’t too pleased then with the plan as it would have obscured the tiny walk-up restaurant.

A May 10, 2007 editorial “In Our View: Openness Please” quotes then city Councilman Tim Leavitt saying the sale is “perceived as a behind-the-scenes, behind-closed-doors, disposition of public property.”

The editorial goes on to state, “But it is understandable that some residents might think favoritism was at play and that the city should have advertised the property to the highest bidder rather than settled with Kassab for $200,000. City staff and the council ignore the perception of favoritism at their political peril.”

The Burgerville concern is no more, now that Kassab stepped up and bought the restaurant and property for $750,000 this past March.

In April 2011 Kassab made a $4 Million sale of property to the Port of Ridgefield with the term “to reinvest at least $1 million in another property purchased within the port’s 57-square-mile district.”

According to that Columbian article, “Kassab said he is considering one of two sites that are situated closer to the I-5 junction. There he expects to develop the 12-plex cinema and retail complex that he had originally planned for the 17-acre site.”

I am not averse to the idea of anyone making just as much money as possible, as long as it is honest and not on taxpayers’ backs. Especially given that we are still mired in the “Great Recession” with apparently no end in sight.

What does disturb me in this request for a tax break is, with the notion being floated of socking the struggling middle class with an “entertainment tax” to pay the lion’s share of a baseball stadium to house the Yakima Bears in their planned move to Vancouver, Kassab said of that tax on moviegoers, “If that is what it is going to take to bring economic development, then I am not going to oppose it,” adding it is their choice.

The previous year when Battle Ground was discussing such an entertainment tax, Kassab was dead against it.

It should be remembered that recently as seniors and disabled living downtown were told their free parking days were over, Ellie Kassab, who developed the Lewis and Clark Plaza and the center of that controversy, was said to have “dropped the ball” over supplying adequate parking at that facility.

As I recall, there was a question raised then about waivers being given to developers to supply adequate parking, the help them trim their cost of constructing downtown residences, no doubt so those projects would “pencil out.”

Kassab is quoted in a June 11 Letter to the Editor “There’s no free lunch in this world; we all have to pay our share.”

It appears to me that while Kassab and others like him are not exactly receiving free lunches from city council, they are getting a discounted lunch you and I in the struggling middle class are not entitled to.