Rules Committee backs ordinance to form Downtown Revitalization Financing District under AB 2488

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors Rules Committee voted unanimously to send an ordinance to the full board that would establish and define the board of directors for a Downtown Revitalization and Economic Recovery Financing District enabled by state law AB 2488.

The ordinance, sponsored by Supervisor Dorsey and co-sponsored by Mayor London Breed and other supervisors, would create a separate district board to oversee a financing plan that can divert incremental property tax generated by office-to-residential or commercial-to-residential conversions back to those projects for up to 30 years. The committee vote to transmit the ordinance to the full board passed without objection.

The district would apply to a defined downtown boundary and is intended to incentivize adaptive reuse projects by returning incremental tax revenue to developers who opt into the program. Jacob Bentliff of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) told the committee that preliminary consultant…