West City steering committee votes 6-1 to recommend CRA plan as state bills threaten new projects

The West City Community Redevelopment Area steering committee voted 6-1 Thursday to recommend the committee’s latest community redevelopment plan to the Community Redevelopment Agency, moving the plan closer to a sequence of hearings that city staff said could result in commission adoption in June.

The vote was the committee’s formal endorsement of the draft plan after Jamie Perkins, the city’s neighborhood services director and CRA manager, presented the latest revisions and scheduling. Perkins said the plan — draft 15 in the meeting packet — retains a six-point strategic action plan and will be posted to the city’s CRA website.

Perkins said the draft removes the term “marketing” from business-development language because of current legislative scrutiny: “marketing is not something that CRA dollars should be paying for,” she said. She listed the remaining priorities as mobility and connectivity, stormwater improvements, historic signage and branding tied to the special district, and locally focused business development.

Why it matters: the plan creates a framework to use tax increment financing (TIF) for mobility,…