Here’s the items they had on their agenda and what happened – before they got to the department presentations on the budget.
Mayor explains they have a regular agenda for Board of Estimates, a joint meeting with county board people at 5:00 for the joint Public Health budget and at that point they will place on the table any item, they will convene their meeting and they will meet together and act as a joint committee with Personnel and Finance.
They pass the entire agenda except items 4 and 11.
Block 89 Finagling
You can here Mike Verveer saying off camera “very complex”.
Chris Schmidt asks about why they moved it up, is it because we have a project coming up with TIF for the square.
Verveer suggests that Anne Zellhofer help answer the question as well.
Dave Schmiedicke says the bonds can be called/paid off in 2014, the tenant in this case, ULI appraoched the city to in effect pay off the bonds and then the tenant ULI would assume the remaining principle on the bonds and finance it themselves. That leads to a cascading effect of transfer of the property and Anne can go into that.
Zellhofer asks what the question was.
Schmidt asks if this was moved up because of the Judge Doyle Square project?
Zellhofer says it was not moved up due to the Judge Doyle Square project but because the bonds can finally be redeemed in full without any penalty effective 1/1/ of 2014 and the developer desired to do so.
Passes unanimously on a voice vote without discussion.
RFQ for CDA to issue for SRO housing for homeless
Verveer says he asked these questions a week ago privately but he felt it was important to have these asked and answered publicly. He says he thinks this is one of the most important initiatives in the capital budget – the Single Room Occupancy housing. His two questions why CDA? Why FRQ instead of RFP at this stage? And three, they can answer too, generally share the time line, it is fairly aggressive.
Natalie Erdman says “why CDA?” She says most of this is around having to move quickly if we are going to make a February 3rd deadline for turning in a tax credit applicaiton, so they decided to make it go quickly but have an open and transparent process and they talked to the city attorney’s office and they were told the CDA by statute by Madison General Ordinance is the Housing Authority for the City of Madison and as the Housing Authority it is tasked with at the request of the council, developing or creating affordable housing and this falls squarely within the realm for why the CDA was created. The other is that the CDA has done multiple low income housing tax credit transactions. Monona Shores was their first, Allied Drive Revival Ridge was their second, Burr Oaks Sr. Housing was their third and Truax Housing Redevelopment which was a public housing redevelopment was their fourth and each of those they went out for RFQ or RFP for a partner to do the heavy lifting on a tax credit application, which is very time consuming and needs a specific knowledge base and selling the tax credits to investors. We have the staff knowledge, but they don’t have the staff capacity to put together that kind of application in a 3 month time period. Why CDA? CDA was created to do this for the City of Madison, it has had this experience and they still have two alders sitting on the board and with open records and public input process so they believed they could run the process quickly through the CDA.
^^^^^ I beg to differ on much of that. The CDA process is murky. The council is giving up a lot of their power in this situation to a board that I don’t believe is better suited for this project. They have very different attitudes and goals when it comes to many housing issues and this is not a public housing or typical tax credit program – if they start applying all their screening criteria and rules to people trying to get into housing, who will be left to be able to live there? Plus, I am just biased against groups that hold their meetings during the day, that start even their evening meetings before 5:00 when most people can’t get there and don’t link the materials they CLEARLY have to the agendas so people can see them in advance. It’s not a transparent process. They give people 400+ page documents to comment on, knowing no one except Legal Action of Wisconsin Attorneys can do so. I don’t believe they are trying to be open and transparent or want input. Recent attempts by advocates to change various policies have fallen on deaf ears.
Why an RFQ vs RFP? There is a lot of things about putting this transaction together that remain to be worked out as they get through the details. Some of that could be what section of the work a developer does vs a service provider/case management organization does. They may have an organization with expertise and financial capacity for the development side, but wish for them to provide with a local provider for management and case management services. What they are looking for is to find entities that have financial capacity, staff capacity and experience to handle a tax credit transaction that serves homeless adults, and then we want to talk with them about how they slice up what needs to be done, what part would the government do (the city), what part would the cda do, what part would a service provider do, that is why a RFQ instead of proposal.
In terms of timeline, this would get referred to CDA, staff with input from the CDA, CDBG folks, housing strategy folks, CDA staff would put together the RFQ, it would be published for at least two weeks in a row and there would be another week before we had responses back. So if we do that after the council passes this, that is still the later part of October before that goes out and it will be the later part of November before we get responses back, but that would allow us to put together a committee to review the proposals and right now staff is recommending that the committee have a member of the CDA, the CDBG and Housing Strategy Committee as well as a member or representative from the county that has experience with homeless issues and a 5th position of a generalist position. They are working to get that committee set up by the CDA so that they could review proposals at the end of November and start working towards having a partner in place for that tax credit application in February. They would propose to bring the recommendation back to the CDA and the CDA would report out to the council in terms of partnering and scope of services and next steps in terms of council oversight.
Motion passes on a voice vote unanimously.
