Looking ahead this week, Council, I mean, the CRA Board, has a full agenda. Looking closer, quite a few items are being continued until after the new year. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a couple of items to watch closely this week.

Item 6 is a big one. This is an outline for how the city can use various CRA dollars for infrastructure improvements for the private, commercial GasWorx development. Glancing it all over, it is a good sell job. Will the CRA board be buying is the question.

If I was only going to pay attention to one item this week, it would be item 8. This relates to what have been on going discussions about capping the Downtown CRA to free up more money in the general fund. My recollection of the preliminary discussions was that Assistant City Attorney Massey said for the Downtown CRA it should be trivial to cap downtown in relation to the Interlocal agreement with the County. Apparently the winds have shifted or new language has been added to now try and dissuade the conversation. Two items from Mr. Massey’s memos.

What I think is happening here is that we are going to get creative with how we use CRA funds again, push the boundaries and not cap downtown. I mean, GasWorx really needs that money.

Number 9 sounds contentious “Deputy City Attorney, Morris Massey to provide an update on whether the terms of the agreement between the City and the CRA have been violated and what the CRA Board can do to move the project along.” But I’m not sure what project needs to be moved along. There aren’t any supporting documents for this item so tune in to find out.

It should also be noted that in addition to continuing to serve his community, while also running for County Commission, former Council member Joseph Citro is up for a seat on the Ybor CRA CAC.