Mary Anna Towler nails it in her December 24 Urban Journal ("Our COMIDA Is in a Gift-giving Mood"). The Wilmot family has a lot of gall to expect us to believe that they wouldn't do the Greece Ridge Mall project without us handing them $192,000 in tax breaks.

Presumably Wilmorite has done market research and has invested in renovation planning. Yet somehow we are to believe they won't go ahead with their $6 million plan without our subsidy. That's like me planning on spending six grand to redo my basement but then telling the contractors that I'm not going to go ahead unless they take $192 off the price.

Why would Maggie Brooks fall for that and let $192,000 in tax revenue slip through her fingers?

But Towler's larger point about demand in the retail market is really the bottom line here. COMIDA is supposed to use tax subsidies to help create local jobs. Handing out tax breaks to malls doesn't create more jobs, because retail is pretty much a zero-sum game. Spiffing up the mall won't increase the amount of socks and handbags that we purchase. If local residents buy more at Greece Ridge, then we'll buy less at some other shop owned by a hardworking business owner who isn't receiving a subsidy. If enough people switch their business to Greece Ridge, the other business owners will decrease their employee hours.

So that's not creating jobs. That's shifting jobs from one business to another. (Wilmorite is only promising to create two new jobs at a subsidy rate of $96,000 per job created.)

Once again, Maggie Brooks' COMIDA is at the cutting edge of abusing loopholes. New York State had prohibited subsidizing retail through the Industrial Development Agencies, but last year the retail prohibition law sunsetted amid the legislative battle over IDA reform. (Former Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno, then new leader Dean Skelos, promised comprehensive reform, but then did nothing.) As a result, Judy Seil, COMIDA's executive director, and Michael Townsend, the agency's legal counsel, are able to use the loophole to hand over a COMIDA subsidy to the Wilmots.

Maggie Brooks' COMIDA is out of control. We need statewide IDA reform to reign in COMIDA and make sure that tax subsidies are used intelligently to create actual jobs with good wages. The IDAs were never supposed to be about handshakes on golf courses.

For years, Metro Justice has worked with allies around the state to push for comprehensive IDA reform. We succeeded in getting the Assembly to pass excellent IDA reform legislation last year. 2009 should be the year for the State Senate to pass comprehensive IDA reform. We are calling on our local senators (Maziarz, Alesi, Robach, and Nozzolio) to show leadership in building bipartisan support for IDA reform.

JOHN GREENBAUM, ROCHESTER

(Greenbaum is an organizer with the progressive community activist group Metro Justice.)