City Council Minutes 2019 11 04 - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Council Meeting Minutes November 4, 2019 Page 8 of 20 something to happen there. Even if it becomes office on the first floor that is still more bodies downtown to help support other retail. Approval also sends a message to the business community we want to help. We have an interested party wanting to improve this location and we should support that. Councilmember Keany stated this is an important thing for the community to do for downtown. He hears from residents that downtown needs to be revitalized. This is a rebate. We need to support this. He was concerned if we don't support this applicant they may move to another location leaving multiple buildings vacant downtown. This makes sense for the community. Mayor Muckle stated supporting this is not in conflict with other projects in the area. He doesn't think this sets a fixed precedent that requires us to use it other places. This location would benefit from a newer building and bring people downtown. He would like to see retail, but doesn't want to require it. Councilmember Stolzmann stated she agreed with Councilmember Maloney. She stated she would like a time commitment included similar to the business assistance packages. She would like to see a requirement for retail on the first floor. She stated the BAPs and the TIF program are different and have different goals. She too feels it doesn't meet the requirements for extraordinary circumstances and is precendent setting. Councilmember Leh asked Councilmember Stolzmann which criteria it doesn't meet. Councilmember Stolzmann stated she feels that as proposed it doesn't meet many of the criteria in the policy. Councilmember Leh stated this is a rigorous process for the rebate. Part of being a business owner is that we all value certainty and adding different requirements and changing rules in the middle of the game are hard to deal with. He feels the extraordinary benefit is the only factor we are really arguing about and the policy stated the proposed project must address three or more of the objectives in the policy. He feels the application meets enough of the criteria. If we don't approve this we are sending a signal to downtown we are not serious about supporting those businesses with the tools we have in our tool kit. The Council should not put yet another restriction on how we approve TIF benefits. Most certainly three or more criteria are addressed by this application. There is a project in front of us we should consider, while not worrying about possible later projects. We are sending a message to businesses and to other communities we are willing to use this tool. We continue to say we are friendly to business but we are running out of time in making that argument. For those reasons he supports this. Mayor Pro Tem Lipton stated the criteria he noted are qualifying for any project however the extraordinary benefits are more stringent and this doesn't meet that. To get the 90 % they need to offer more.