Council hears CBRE update and four developer pitches as downtown ranking nears

Boca Raton — CBRE presented updated financial comparisons of four teams bidding to redevelop the city’s government campus and downtown on Monday, and the four proposers each gave final pitches as the council prepared to rank the respondents at a scheduled meeting the next day.

CBRE consultant Leigh Ann Kors told the City Council the firm had asked proposers to model civic components on a consistent basis — an 85,000-square-foot city hall and a 35,000-square-foot community center — so the city could compare bids on the same assumptions. A CBRE analyst said the team adjusted its tax-increment modeling (raising the tax-growth assumption to 3% and the discount rate to 4.5%) and reported several proposal-specific changes, including ground-rent increases, transfer-fee commitments and revised unit counts.

The updates matter because the council will use the normalized financial analysis alongside qualitative evaluations when it ranks the teams tomorrow and opens negotiations with the top-ranked proposer. CBRE said the city will host an open house Feb. 19 (6–8 p.m.) for the highest-ranked respondent and aims to finish a negotiated,…