Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
A majority of the city council has agreed to move forward with a feasibility study for a tax increment reinvestment zone for the downtown area.
The council discussed and approved an ordinance authorizing City Manager John Sheedy to award a contract for professional services to TXP, Inc., “for a tax increment reinvestment zone feasibility analysis and implementation for the downtown area” during its Feb. 14 meeting.
After the agenda item was announced, Mayor Al Arreola called for a motion. Councilman Jim DeReus made a motion to approve the ordinance, and Mayor Pro-tem Steve Webb gave the second.
After making the motion, DeReus offered his thoughts on the TIRZ.
“I’m still not sold on the TIRZ. I know you and I have talked about it, and I’m really interested to get their recommendations and feasibility study, but we’ve primarily focused on discussing a TIRZ for the downtown area. Are there other places in town that we should possibly look at this, and if we think we should, should we add that to this, because adding another area to this feasibility study would probably much less than doing two separate feasibility studies,” DeReus said.
“I apologize for springing this on you, I forgot to let you know I was going to ask,” the councilman added.
“No, no, that’s a very good point,” Sheedy replied.
“I guess as far as the TIRZ, the downtown TIRZ, this is something from almost the first day that I was in the city manager position, is something that I’ve been very passionate about. We’ve seen example after example of downtowns that have completely transformed, almost overnight, and as far as the question, we are absolutely going to have another TIRZ, which will be quite an extensive one, as soon as we come up with the property, which will be our industrial park, and so we’ll be looking at putting another TIRZ there,” Sheedy said.
“We kind of felt that we wanted to start on this one, just because it feels like we’ve got so many things that we’re waiting on, councilman, so we wanted to go ahead and move on this smaller one, and we talked to the consultant about that, and he saw the value in, if we just start on one, because again, if we get two going at the same time, it’s going to get complicated. We have to do the boards and everything, so we isolated to just this one,” Sheedy said.
“That’s our idea. Just move forward with the TIRZ downtown, so we can kind of learn the process of setting up a TIRZ, what all is involved in it, and hopefully our next TIRZ or two will be a much faster process,” the city manager added.
“Okay, thank you,” DeReus replied.
There were no further questions, and when Arreola called for the vote, all of the council voted in favor of the motion, with the exceptions of Councilwoman Alexandra Falcon Calderon and Councilman J.P. Sanchez, who both abstained.
After the vote, Sheedy said he would be taking the issue before the Del Rio Economic Development Corporation as well, saying he was sure they would fund the $44,500 cost of the feasibility study.
“This is directly in their lane,” Sheedy told the council.
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com .
