Yesterday the TIF Policy Committee met to discuss priorities for TIF funding. Current priorities are Support the Downtown, Neighborhood Revitalization and Economic Development. (This isn’t the current policy, I can’t find the current policy with all of the changes on line anywhere, but the priorities haven’t changed. This link has some of the information but you have to put it all together yourself.)
The Committee hasn’t come to any conclusions yet, but from what I can tell from the conversation yesterday and a what I would like to see, this is where I think we are going.
Support Job Creation and Retention of Employers
– Jobs should be not just high end bio-tech jobs by jobs.
– Jobs with natural promotion opportunities should be encouraged.
– It may mean more emphasis on industrial TIF or it could be integrated into the neighborhoods.
Workforce Housing
– This topic didn’t have much discussion, seemed to be a recognized need.
– There seemed to be an understanding that we didn’t need to create more high end condos downtown.
Blight Reduction
– We mean blight in the layman’s understanding of the work, not the technical legal sense (i.e. a dead bird on the sidewalk is not blight).
Neighborhood Revitalization
– We need to focus on the truly low income neighborhoods that need assistance and areas that have aged.
– We might prioritize certain districts.
Infrastructure
– We didn’t discuss this much, but committee members would like more public input into what infrastructure is going to be paid for with TIF.
We also discussed that the City of Madison has to set clear goals and have the developers respond to our goals instead of the City responding to developer projects. We also discussed that we needed to review our goals every 3 – 5 years so they don’t become outdated.
I believe the next step for the committee should be to discuss each of these areas individually and come up with more definition for what we are looking for. It appears we may not necessarily rank these in priority order, but may express preferences for certain types of goals being met.
