The City Council is close to signing a pact with McCormick Baron Salazar (MBS) for another go at making Rolling Hills – Rolling Taxpayers, I call it – viable. Mostly on your dime, of course.

In fact, enough dimes to eventually total $48 million for the Research Triangle’s most expensive affordable housing. Sorry, Chapel Hill.

Mayor Bill Bell wants Rolling Hills, quietly renamed Southside to dispel the stench of failure from earlier city-backed projects, as his signature accomplishment. And what Bell wants, Council almost certainly will deliver.

MBS must be yukking all the way to the bank – and I don’t blame the St. Louis developer one bit. If the City Council’s so stuck on stupid that it approves a pact allowing the firm to pay only 8 percent of the tab and eventually end up owning the apartments, go for it.

What’s poised to happen – MBS wants to move dirt in September – is but the latest bid to rehab a a dismal 20-acre tract just south of the Durham Freeway. City efforts to plant affordable housing there go back almost 40 years, squandering millions along the way.

Bell and his allies obviously believe that since nothing has worked so far, they should keep trying until something does. Thus the desperation deal with MBS, which some at City Hall now regard as an invasive species in the Byzantine planning and permitting process that’s supposed to produce 132 apartments in 2015.

Eighty units fall into the affordable category, meaning they are for tenants earning 60 percent of less of median income here, or about $27,682. In that respect, most of Rolling Hills Phase I consists of heavily subsidized housing. Phase II calls for an additional 79 apartments.

So how does MBS make money on anything this risky? Because 92 percent of the risk stays with Durham and the feds.

For example, the city will put up to $5 million directly into Phase I and grace MBS with a $5.5 million, interest-free loan over 45 years, with repayment from rental income. Thanks to inflation, over those 45 years MBS will repay the city in increasingly cheaper dollars – and then buy the Phase I site for $1.

Meanwhile, MBS further insulates itself from risk by selling $10 million in tax credits.

Had enough? Not yet, Bucko. For Phase II the city ponies up $3 million plus a $3.4 million construction loan to MBS.

Such figures spill like beans from the proposed agreement with MBS, and in the abstract they don’t mean much to most of us.

Try this: Each unit in Phase I costs up to $158,000. For that, a private developer could build 264 units while paying for the land underneath. MBS pays essentially nothing for the land and stands to gain the whole enchilada.

No one should begrudge Bill Bell a legacy project, but this one has so many tripwires that the council should simply start over. Its due diligence obligation is to the taxpayers, not the mayor.

Call it Rolling Hills, call it Southside, call it a pig in a poke. If the City Council imposes a property tax hike for affordable housing in the coming budget, you’ll know what to call it.