FLASHBACK: San Francisco City Hall fed up with Twitter tax break.

The Twitter tax break is dead, and on Thursday City Hall gave it the most unflattering eulogy possible, lawmakers griping that the measure failed to transform the Mid-Market neighborhood and some swearing never to repeat the experiment.

Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district covers Mid-Market, arranged the post-mortem hearing, which took place at a regular meeting of the city’s Government Audit & Oversight Committee.

According to the meeting agenda, the intent was “to review the outcomes of the Central Market Tax Exclusion of 2011, examining the impact on City resources, economic growth, its effect on vacant store fronts, and the negotiated community benefits.”

In 2011 the city offers a 1.5 percent payroll tax break to Mid-Market companies. The deal expired in May, with nobody at City Hall taking up the mantle of arguing for a renewal.

The stated purpose of the deal was to boost the long-troubled Mid-Market neighborhood, but the clear primary intent was to prevent Twitter from moving out of San Francisco, and to attract similar companies to Mid-Market properties.

On Thursday, city economist Ted Egan noted that on some fronts the law was a success, as Mid-Market is indeed now well-known for playing host to a variety of big-name SF companies.

Egan also argued that the tax break was a win for the city’s budget, furnishing numbers that reveal the neighborhood generated a net tax increase of $6.75 million more that it would have if companies like Twitter had not relocated there.

But committee members were not eager to look on the sunny side of the now-expired policy. Supervisor Aaron Peskin called the tax exclusion “a terrible piece of public policy that should have never been passed” and “antithetical to good taxation policy.”

Others noted that Mid-Market still struggled with many of the same problems as it did before the tax deal.

San Francisco will miss Twitter, if and when it’s gone: