Among other things being voted on tonight, the council will be voting on which developer and project they want to go with on Judge Doyle Square.
Catching Up
It’s number 35 on the agenda, all the attachments are here.
There’s $53M in the budget for the project. Money comes from TID 25 and $21.2M in cash – $18M from parking utility reserves and $13.9M from the sale of the land.
The first question is, so the like Beitler Real Estate or Vermillion.
The second question is do they like the proposals with the above ground or below ground parking.
The Board of Estimates chose Beitler but split 3 – 3 on the question of cheaper proposal (Verveer, McKinney, Rummel) and more expensive on (DeMarb, Cheeks, Eskrich) and the Mayor broke the tie for the expensive one.
Questions that seem irrelevant:
1. What does the School Board think? (They want the TIF district closed and are pissed the City spent $20M without getting permission from the Joint Review Board. They support the cheaper Beitler proposal, they want the TIF closed in 2016 and they want their $12M.) Letter is signed by all 7 School Board members. They seem open to a new TIF district being established.
2. What about Equity? Where is the analysis?
Well, there’s a memo. Which essentially says THIS IS NOT AN EQUITY ANALYSIS, THIS IS NOT THE WAY IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DONE! PEOPLE IMPACTED NEED TO BE INCLUDED.
a. “this request by the Board of Estimates to complete this type of analysis does not follow national best practices related to racial equity work and we are not aware of equity analyses being used anywhere else in the nation for a redevelopment project of this magnitude. Thus, this report is simply intended to provide recommendations that may enhance the project, regardless of which developer is selected moving forward.”
b. “While detailed information was available for use by the team, the essential component of community engagement to allow for the intentional involvement of low-income populations and people of color in the decisions and discussions, limit the usefulness of the tool.”
c. “While the group recommends continued use of racial equity tools in analysis, it becomes problematic to
perform these analyses without inclusion of low income populations and people of color. Further, this group would like to emphasize to decision makers that people of color and low income individuals or those representing their needs, were not provided the opportunity to speak to their own needs in the analysis related to this project.”
d. Concerns
Several concerns were articulated related to the requirement that the project go through this type of analysis at this juncture. Those concerns include:
– Lack of available resources for inclusion of people of color in analysis.
– Lack of available time for adequate analysis.
– Lack of ability to impact community inequities related to the limited scope of the analysis. Some of
these potential impacts may include:
oAvailability of affordable housing in the downtown area.
oContinued inequities in employment rates for people of color.
oContinued inequities in wages/income in occupations that employ a larger percentage of people of color.
oContinued inequities in construction and trades positions for people of color.
Again, it is always beneficial to pause and ask the questions being asked here, however, it is recommended
that the tool only be used in future projects after successfully passing through the use of the RESJI scoping tool. It is recommended that the City establish widely-understood parameters and expectations guiding the use of racial equity analysis tools.
3. What about the many exceptions, again?
For the record, none of the proposals actually are what they asked for, so of course, they created now 5 exceptions. Cuz they make rules, can’t stick to them, then make exceptions.
Other Things to watch out for . . .
From this memo.
– How affordable (or not) is this housing being built?
– Is it worth the cost to have below ground parking?
– Does below ground parking allow for flexibility in the future?
– With the ground lease with Beitler, if they don’t make the rents and hotel room rates, the tax payers could end up paying for the cost of the ground lease. From this memo.
– Apparently goals for minority hiring in these projects have been determined to be illegal by the city attorney. From this memo.
– The goal is to have the final vote on the deal on July 5th, so the TIF paperwork can be in to the state by October 31st.
– Here’s 73 more pages of info I didn’t wade through.
– More info here about how to choose which project, from 4/8 BOE meeting.
I apologize, I couldn’t keep up with this round . . . work overwhelmed me for the past month while most of this was going on. I have talked with several alders and skimmed a bunch of information and have been convinced that Beitler A is the better proposal, in agreement with the school board and the alders who lost the vote at BOE. A better choice is to have the staff keep negotiating for something in between the two proposed projects by Beitler.
