Dan Gilbert's top lobbyist is denying a key claim in an investigative story suggesting that the billionaire's team exerted its considerable political and economic muscle to net federal Opportunity Zone tax breaks when they weren't warranted.

The Thursday story in the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica says that a census tract laden with Gilbert-owned real estate in and around downtown did not meet certain requirements of the new break on capital gains taxes, yet it became a Qualified Opportunity Zone anyway.

The piece suggests Gilbert's team influenced the White House to add it to the list of census tracts that the state could ultimately select.

Jared Fleisher, vice president of government affairs and economic development for Gilbert's Quicken Loans Inc. mortgage behemoth, penned an op-ed in The Detroit News Friday morning denying that claim, calling it "simply not true."

"We had a different analysis for this tract, because this is incredibly complex stuff," Fleisher wrote. "The U.S. Treasury Department ultimately confirmed that analysis when it put out the final lists. That is truly it, nothing more."

The ProPublica story says that in mid February 2018, at the request of a Michigan Economic Development Corp. Senior Vice President of Growth and Development Christine Roeder, an official with Michigan State Housing Development Authority reached out to a Quicken Loans lobbyist, who asked about how the state would select the zones.

The state housing official, Brian Mills, said cities would "have a lot of sway in the process," the story says. Shortly thereafter, maps reflecting Fleisher's input were emailed from the city to the state, and those maps included a census tract that was too wealthy to meet Opportunity Zone eligibility requirements, ProPublica says.

Soon after that, a revised list of eligible tracts from the Treasury Department included the one that was originally deemed too wealthy, on the western edge of downtown spreading into Corktown and along the west Detroit riverfront.

"The underlying allegation is that we engaged in advocacy or manipulation to make this west riverfront Census tract eligible," Fleisher said in a Friday interview. "We did nothing of the sort."

The zones are designated according to U.S. census tracts where the poverty rate is at least 20 percent and the median household income is less than 80 percent of that in the surrounding areas. Only up to 25 percent of the eligible census tracts could become Opportunity Zones in any given state.

According to CensusReporter.org, the tract in question has a population of 1,601 over a half-square-mile. The median household income is $68,100, about 1.5 times the amount in Wayne County ($43,702) and 1.3 times the Michigan median household income of $52,668, the website says. Its poverty rate is 7.9 percent, or about a third of the 23.7 percent poverty rate in Wayne County and half of the overall Michigan poverty rate of 15.6 percent. Census Reporter is funded by the Knight News Challenge.

"There was a lag in time before the Treasury Department issued maps and lists of census tracts that met any of those (income) criteria," Fleisher said. "During that time, the city wanted to know what areas of Detroit were eligible. We had our mapping person take that and produce a map showing eligible areas. The city did the same, and there was a difference in that track. There was a difference in how our mapping and data scientist applied the data. Ultimately the Treasury Department puts out the definitive lists, and our guy was objectively right about the application of the criteria."

In a statement, Fleisher argued that there would be no tax benefit to Gilbert or his Bedrock LLC real estate company because it had acquired its properties in that census tract before the Opportunity Zones were designated. "ProPublica's thesis that these properties would benefit from this tax treatment is utterly invalid," Fleisher said.

The ProPublica piece suggests that Gilbert, through donations to the inaugural committee and other courtship of President Donald Trump and his administration and family dating back to before the 2016 election, was able to get areas of downtown Detroit designated as Opportunity Zones.

Opportunity Zones, a provision of the federal tax overhaul of 2017, allow the deferral and reduction in capital gains taxes if capital gains are invested in Qualified Opportunity Funds that invest in these areas within 180 days after the gain is realized.

Generally, patience is rewarded with lower taxes. If the gains stay within the fund for five to seven years, the investor has to pay federal capital gains taxes on 90 percent of the original income. If the funds stay at least seven years, the investor pays on only 85 percent.

The result could be millions in capital gains taxes savings for Gilbert, who for the past nine years has been amassing an unrivaled real estate empire in Detroit, starting first with neglected historic skyscrapers and other buildings and now moving into new mixed-use construction on vacant land downtown.

ProPublica also says that Fleisher was deeply involved in the selection at the local level.

He "was so enmeshed in the process, his name appears on an opportunity zone map made by the city economic development organization (the Detroit Economic Growth Corp.), recommending part of downtown be included in the tax break," the reporters wrote. "No other non-city officials are named on the document."

In addition to Fleisher's op-ed, Gilbert's team also, within hours of the ProPublica story being published, created a website, www.oppzonefacts.com, more specifically spelling out its arguments against the premises of the article.

"ProPublica's absurd article about Dan Gilbert and the Rock Family of Companies' involvement in Opportunity Zones is rife with misguided, misleading and utterly baseless allegations parading as fact," a statement on the website says.

"The entire article is predicated on an email from one state official to another that the authors freely admit lacks context," it continues.

"As we shared with ProPublica, economic development groups, private investors and municipalities answered the call for feedback into the Opportunity Zone selection process — at the state's request. It is unfortunate ProPublica ignored this well-known process that is commonplace and essential to make well-informed public policy decisions."

Opportunity Zones have taken fire since their inclusion in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, with critics arguing that they could have been more acutely targeted at U.S. census tracts where investors may need more of a two-handed shove than a gentle nudge to put cash into things like real estate developments and business investments. In addition, others say more oversight is needed of how the funds are used.

Yet those areas of greater downtown Detroit prior to 2017 were teeming with serious, underway development and redevelopment activity ranging from new and redeveloped office buildings to penthouse apartments leasing for thousands of dollars a month to other mixed-use developments.

In Detroit and other cities, that has caused some to argue that the tax benefit provides little more than lip service to helping communities struggling outside of the greater downtown's 7.2 square miles and a handful of other areas like the University District instead of funneling much-needed money into things like affordable housing and jobs.