Twice in the past 40 years Detroit lured a new auto assembly plant to the city by paying a price many came to rue.

In the early 1980s, the city destroyed the old Poletown neighborhood to build the General Motors Hamtramck Assembly plant. And in 1988, taxpayers vastly overpaid for land to build Chrysler's Jefferson North plant in 1988. Both deals led to profound misgivings.

Now some are asking whether Detroit has overpaid once again, this time for the planned new Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Jeep assembly plant on the east side.

At a meeting Tuesday of the city's Economic Development Corp., a body that controls some of the land needed, the board voted 7-2 to approve the transfer, which now goes to the Detroit City Council for final approval. But one of the board members voting no, Matthew Roling, chair of the accounting department at Wayne State University, criticized the pressure exerted by both FCA and the Moroun family that will get a generous payment to turn over its land for the deal.

"It just feels like nothing more than corporate welfare," he said. "This is tantamount to a shakedown."

The City of Detroit itself will pony up more than $50 million from its development funds and swap hundreds of parcels of mostly vacant city-owned property to assemble 215 acres of land that FCA said it needs for the Jeep project.

In exchange, FCA will build the new Jeep plant near Mack and St. Jean and enhance the existing Jefferson North plant, creating nearly 5,000 jobs and $2.5 billion in new investment.

Since no money is coming out of the city's general treasury that supports police and fire operations and the city land being swapped is mostly vacant, Mayor Mike Duggan and other supporters of the deal say the price is more than worth it.

And city officials add that the amount of public subsidies in this case is far lower on a percentage basis than in similar deals in recent years. For the Jeep project, Duggan's office said, subsidies will represent just 11% of FCA's total investment, compared to subsidies worth 56% of a Toyota-Mazda total investment for its plant in Huntsville, Ala., or 41% for Toyota's Georgetown, Ky., plant.

But city leaders said much the same thing in the early 1980s when Detroit demolished the old Poletown neighborhood for the GM plant. Poletown provoked profound controversy and, in hindsight, was based on a legal theory of eminent domain later ruled unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court.

Then, in 1988 the city, under a Chrysler-imposed deadline for construction of its new Jefferson North plant, paid $42 million for three buildings and a parcel of land needed for the project. Controversy erupted the next year when it became known that the city had not even looked inside the buildings before closing the deal, and that $40 million of the purchase price went for equipment on the property that the city later auctioned for just $1.7 million.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit spent three years investigating the deal before concluding there had been no criminal conduct. But as then-City Councilman Mel Ravitz said in 1991, "I have never assumed any criminal wrongdoing. I considered it more of a dumb action than a criminal one."

Will the Jeep plant deal prompt similar regret one day? Certainly, there are big differences to weigh. To cite just one, there is no occupied neighborhood to raze for the Jeep project as there was for Poletown. And Tom Lewand, Duggan's group executive for jobs and economic growth, said Tuesday that enough checks and balances are built into the deal to make the city comfortable that FCA will really deliver the jobs and investment.

"We put some very strong enforcement mechanisms into this one," he said. "And so I feel pretty good that we have learned to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms as we go forward."

The city's official tally shows that the public will pay out $188 million in cash and land to make the deal happen but the city gets $353 million over 30 years in tax revenue.

More:Jeep deal now a done deal with 5,000 jobs and $2.5 billion investment on the way

More:FCA wants $160M in tax incentives for new Jeep plant in Detroit

Matter of priorities

But the answer to the question of whether the deal is worth it depends on where one places priority. In Detroit, as in city after city, the plum reward of thousands of new jobs and billions in investment trumps virtually any other consideration.

Sometimes the deals go sour. Having operated its Hamtramck plant for three decades, GM announced last year it would have no product to produce there beyond this year, effectively shuttering a plant that the city destroyed a neighborhood to build.

Farther afield, critics of using big tax breaks to lure industry point to the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin. Foxconn, the Taiwanese chip maker, negotiated billions in tax breaks from Wisconsin to build a major campus with thousands of new jobs. Since then, Foxconn has dramatically scaled back what it intends to build and critics are crying foul.

What the city is paying

In the deal Duggan announced May 3, the total cost of the 215 acres FCA wants comes to $107.6 million. The state will pay roughly half of that.

Detroit will pay $50.6 million of the total for privately owned land that FCA needs, of which $36 million comes from uncommitted city bond funds, $7.5 million from a loan to the city's Brownfield Development Authority, and $7.1 million from the sale of the city's Millennium Garage downtown.

In other words, the city obtains land for the Jeep plant by using development funds mostly earmarked for such deals. That means that the money will not be available for other deals, which John Mogk, a longtime professor of development law at Wayne State University, calls "a zero-sum game."

Beyond the cash, the city offered land, mostly vacant, from its vast holdings of abandoned and tax foreclosed property in the city.

Among those, DTE Energy will get parcels in various parts of the city to build or expand its substations in exchange for giving up most of the site of its defunct Conners Creek power plant near the river. Businessman John Hantz gives up several parcels he got for his tree-planting Hantz Woodlands project and get other parcels within his project footprint.

But the most controversial swap involved the Moroun family, owners of the Ambassador Bridge, which, through its Crown Enterprises real estate arm, owns the former Budd industrial site near the Chrysler plant, which it leases to FCA for $3 million a year to store vehicles.

Since FCA said it needed the 82-acre parcel, Duggan's negotiators agreed to give the Morouns $43.5 million and about 117 acres of publicly owned land scattered throughout the city, mostly in spots adjacent to property the Morouns already own.

That has sparked protests far from the Jeep plant site near Mack and St. Jean. Some of the land the city offered the Morouns is found in southwest Detroit, where residents fear the Morouns' Ambassador Bridge complex will try to expand in a way that infringes on local residents.

Mogk of Wayne State's law school said the city had no choice, especially since limitations on the city's use of eminent domain for economic development made land assembly much more complex.

"Realistically, Detroit has no choice but to do this deal. It is its only chance to get back in the large scale manufacturing arena upon which its infrastructure is based and which field continues to have a long term future in the U.S.," he said.

"Turning the deal down would border on lunacy. Eminent domain would have allowed land assembly to have been accomplished for much less and eliminated the windfall to the Marouns."

Community benefits

The benefits must be weighed against the cost. FCA agreed to a package of community benefits for the east-side neighborhood as required by a city ordinance. That package includes:

While FCA's UAW members will get first crack at the new jobs under their contract, local Detroit residents will be next in line for the jobs before the general public.

FCA will also pay $5.8 million into a job training fund through the city's Detroit at Work program. The company will also establish a partnership with Wayne County Community College District to create an auto manufacturing program that combines academic work with on-the-job training to get a two-year associate's degree.

FCA will pay $1.8 million for housing rehab grants in the immediate neighborhood of the new plant.

And the city has committed to spending millions on traffic calming and road improvements in the neighborhood, including new paving, sidewalks and more.

Up to City Council now

Detroit's City Council will now take up the deal, against an unofficial deadline of the end of the month. FCA clearly wants to begin construction as soon as possible, putting pressure on council members to approve the deal quickly or be accused of killing jobs and investment.

Clearly, FCA had a stronger bargaining position than the city. FCA was the one dangling the promise of jobs and new investment, and FCA was the one that imposed a nearly impossible 60-day deadline to send a deal to City Council.

Ultimately, it will take an act of faith on Council's part that Duggan's negotiators cut the best deal they could and that FCA will deliver on its promises.

Perhaps no deal struck under such tight pressure could ever be perfect. But how good or bad the deal looks five to 10 years from now will await the judgment of time.

Contact John Gallagher:313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com.Follow him on Twitter@jgallagherfreep. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.