For brevities sake I wrote up a separate wrap-up post for last week on a few items on the agenda. Reminder though, if you ever just want the box score, the Clerk records minutes for each meeting. On the agenda home page there are links for the recent meetings or there is a button at the top of the agenda view. It may take a day or two in some circumstances for the minutes to post, but it’s one big improvement over SIRE. I like to share the URL tampa.gov/agendas vs the URL that redirects to.

Council sits as the CRA Board this week during the morning, and will hear vacacting and rezoning applications in the evening. The primary item the CRA Board will be voting on this week is approving an interlocal agreement by, between and among the Gas Worx Community Development District, the City of Tampa, Florida and the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Tampa, Florida. The dollar amount associated is $32,307,868.

But to be clear, the CRA Board approved the $32 million in December of 2023 in the form a TIF request. Thursday’s vote is dotting i’s and crossing t’s. Council approved the creation of the Gas Worx Community Development District last year. The gist is they don’t get the money until the developments they are building and improving infrastructure for are built and generating enough tax revenue to reimburse. It’s obligating future tax revenue, that would already be captured in the CRA, to specific infrastructure work now. The GasWorx CDD is the mechanism by which the infrastructure projects will be administered. I’m not sure I exactly understand CDDs but suffice to say it sounds more transparent than a private builder undertaking the infrastructure work. It’s an interesting model and to my knowledge unique to the City of Tampa.

That said, expect to hear more about the broader conversations about CRA dollars trapped that could go city wide if we only cap some of them. If you’d like a good overview of the conversation I recommend this piece from Francis Gilpin in the Florida Trident. What I think is missing from that piece is that the CRA Board has already had the discussion and declined to move forward with the process necessary to actually cap a CRA. It does have a quote from Chair Henderson about the city/county relationship which was one concern. But as I understand it, they declined to even attempt a negotiation.Regardless, the way future funds are obligated, the time it would take to rewrite/and/or negotiate any changes with the County means there’s no magic bullet. If they could wave a wand for downtown Thursday capping it at 80%, there wouldn’t be funds available city wide for at least 5 years. Folks can rehash the past all they want jostling for position in 2027, but that’s the reality we face.

To be clear, they are all valid arguments. And if Council was voting on the $32 million dollar TIF request Thursday instead of 14 months ago, they would be relevant to what they are voting on Thursday. But again, as far as I can tell, this should be a formality. Which has never stopped a politician but the TIF request was approved unanimously (see minutes). I’ll add the CRA Board declined two other TIF requests that day prior to this one, so there was ample discussion about what was being asked of them.

One other item that the public should hope to hear from the CRA Board on is the hiring of a new CRA Director. If anything this process has demonstrated Council/CRA need a SOP for hiring. As much as they may want to believe they won’t be doing this again soon, it is a failure to the public to drag this out because there isn’t a process to follow. Workshop item, after action report, hot wash, SWAT you pick a name and commit to it after the new director is hired.

I’m not going to speculate on which items on Thursday’s rezoning agenda might be of concern, but if you’re interested in where they are located the version of the agenda I post now has a location map that includes the Accela link and notes which agenda item. There is a direct link to evening agenda as well if you want to view staff reports, etc.