Council approves multiple urban renewal amendments and reassigns 17 parcels between TIF districts
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Summary
City Council adopted a slate of amendments to several urban renewal (TIF) plans — updating project budgets, removing expired parcels from one district and adding them to another — and approved related ordinances to enable tax-increment financing for planned infrastructure.
The Cedar Falls City Council on Monday approved amendments to multiple urban renewal plans that update budgets and reconfigure district parcels to better align with current infrastructure and development work.
City economic-development staff and planning director Shane Graham told the council the actions are largely technical updates tied to the city's five-year capital-improvement planning process. "Staff was looking at the five-year CIP, looking and seeing what TIF-related funding for any projects were out there, which led to looking at all of our urban renewal plans," Graham said.
Major actions approved included amendment number 2 to the College Hill Urban Renewal Plan (updated budgets for development agreements and maintenance/improvements); amendment number 7 to the Downtown Development Urban Renewal Plan (budget updates for public improvements and land acquisition); amendment number 3 to the Pinnacle Prairie commercial urban renewal plan (to cover updated street and infrastructure costs tied to a roundabout project); and amendment number 7 to the Cedar Falls Unified Highway 58 Corridor Urban Renewal Plan.
The Highway 58 amendment both removes 17 undeveloped parcels in the West Viking Road Industrial Park (parcels whose collection period had expired) and deletes an area previously held in the plan while tax-rebate agreements were active. Council subsequently added those 17 parcels into the South Cedar Falls urban renewal area via amendment number 1 to that plan so those parcels can be part of the South Cedar Falls financing and planning program.
Graham and other staff said the parcels involved are city-owned and were never developed, so the actions do not remove active tax revenues; rather, the changes align which district will be used to support infrastructure to encourage future private development. "A lot of times, what these projects do is they allow us ... to invest in infrastructure to attract businesses," Graham said, noting criteria tied to job creation and minimum building sizes for industrial sites.
Each amendment followed the required consultation process with other taxing entities (county and school districts were invited to consultation meetings; none attended) and passed by roll call vote.
The council also approved an ordinance (first consideration, contingent on the prior amendment) to direct property taxes from the amended Highway 58 urban renewal area into a special fund to pay principal and interest on loans or bonds incurred for projects in that area.
