Urban Renewal Authority - Regular Meeting

Newell authority meeting on November 18 at 06:30PM. Will you please call roll? Absolutely.

Commissioner Orr? Here. Commissioner Baer? Present. Commissioner Hoback? Here. Commissioner Peppler? Commissioner O'Connor?

Here.

Commissioner Peso Morelli here chair Moore here commissioner Sheikh here commissioner Mortolero

here

vice chair Bell here and commissioner Phaps

alright we'll move on we'll see if we have a motion to approve the agenda tonight so move second motion second all in favor say aye all opposed say no. Alright. Motion carries. We have a an agenda. We have one item on the consent agenda tonight. It's item twenty five five ninety seven, approval of the 10/14/2025 Urban Renewal Authority meeting minutes. We'll see if I have a motion to sense doing. Then sense And we'll we'll see see if if we anybody has anything to address the Urban Renewal Authority board tonight.

I don't have anybody signed up.

I don't know. Alright. We'll move right into general business. We have two items tonight. The first one is twenty five six seventeen, which is a public hearing, a resolution of the Board of Commissioners to the Town of Erie Urban Renewal Authority adopting the 2026 budget and appropriating sums of money for the 2026 budget year. All right. And we'll be joined by Lockheed Woods, our URA and development accounting analyst and Julian Joaquin, economic development director.

Good evening, chair Moore and members of the Tonawiri URA board. My name is Lachlan Woods, and I'm joined tonight by Julian. I know there's a lot on the agenda tonight, so we'll just kind of hop into the presentation and kind of run through it fairly quickly, and then leave plenty of time for for questions. At the end, just a reminder, this is the budget for the URA, which is going be a little different than your budget for the town because there's a lot less discretion in terms of the numbers that go into this budget. A lot of it's based off of agreements that are already in place, work that's done by the county assessor's office to determine property tax values.

So a lot of these numbers are kind of predetermined, and we're just kind of filling in the dots. So starting off with the revenues, we have about just over $6,000,000 in revenues budgeted for fiscal year 2026. The majority of that, as you can see in this pie chart, is from property taxes. That makes sense because property taxes are collected in all of the URA plan areas, although the exact amount differs based on the plan area. Sales taxes are only collected in the historic Old Town and 9 Mile plan areas at the current moment.

So that's why you have smaller amounts of sales taxes. And then you have investments in fees and charges. The primary source of the revenue from fees and charges is gonna be your admin fees where we charge a 1% admin fee on some of the remittance of property taxes to overlapping jurisdictions that have requested as part of the agreements, don't keep our property tax, we'd like that back, and we take 1% out as we remit it to them. Basically, trends, property taxes are increasing in three of the four plan areas with activity. They went down very slightly, but mostly were just kind of stagnant in Colliers Hill.

Not exactly sure why that is, but it it could be due to just, you know, differences in in the valuation of because that's a primary residential area. So if you had decreases in in residential valuations or the assessment rate on residential, that would result in reductions there. And sales taxes are increasing in both Historic Old Town and 9 Mile, where we collect them. Expenditures. The primary expense for the Urban Renewal Authority is economic development incentives.

And I have a slide in a little bit to go through what those are. So that's $3,000,000 in economic development incentives. And then the next big expenditure is capital. We have one major capital project that's new in the URA for fiscal year 2026. Just to be transparent, we're anticipating a rollover of the pedestrian bridge from Colliers Hill to historic Old Town of about $3,500,000 So that will be coming in in spring supplemental.

It was budgeted this year, which is why if you're looking at actuals versus expenditures, those are higher. We anticipate bringing that in spring supplemental for 2026. Fees and cost allocation. Cost allocation is a big one. And then fees is primarily the county treasurer fee. They take out a small portion of the property taxes that they remit to the URA. Professional services, that's gonna be consulting and legal debt. That's from the historic Old Town area where we have bonds for historic Old Town for the downtown infrastructure project. And then maintenance, that's a new line item in the historic Old Town URA due to the acquisition of property. So it's lawn basically lawn care for for the property that the URA now owns.

Here, you can see the budget by plan area kind of broken down into those same categories. You can see that there are no revenues currently in the airport or I 25 gateway. I 25 gateway, that's expected. It's just too new of a plan. We would We'll potentially see revenues in 2026, and then we'll probably see a substantial jump so in the 2027 budget and then in a substantial jump in the 2028 budget based on the timeline of development out there.

And so we can come back to the slide if there are any questions. But this is mostly just here so you can understand how it's broken down by plan areas. Going back to that expense category of economic development incentives, that comes in three different plan areas. And so we'll start actually, I'll start with Nine Mile and Four Corners because those are the simplest. Those are plan areas where we worked with the developer to establish those plan areas.

And the TIF revenues that are coming in are going back to the developer or, more likely in these cases, a business improvement district or a metro district that financed bonds to pay for the public improvements. And we're basically just passing along those revenues via the URA. So a nine mile or Highway 287, that's 99% of the property taxes and 50% of the non King Soopers sales tax increment that's there, and that's pledged to the nine mile metropolitan district. In 4 Corners, it's 100% of the property tax increment that goes to the 4 Corners Business Improvement District. Historical town's a little different, where there's no one developer that was kind of a master developer of the whole area.

But there are a number of businesses and developers that have expanded you know, created new invested in the area, remediated blight. And so there are five active TIF TIF reimbursement agreements that help fund blight mitigation and redevelopment in historic Old Town Erie. We can go through those if you have any questions, the newest one being Lucille's. And then there's also the Downtown Revitalization Incentive Grant program, which is for smaller projects that don't necessarily need their own specific TIF agreement. But you can get up to, I think, $50,000.

It depends on the structure, but it's generally a smaller amount of money. And it goes to similar things like the light mitigation redevelopment in historical Old Town. And generally, we budget, I believe, dollars 100,000 for that every year. So you saw one big capital project for the URA, one new big capital project for the 2026 budget. That is the Colliers Hill Detention Pond improvement.

So there's a regional detention pond in Colliers Hill that benefits Colliers Hill plan area, all of the the housing development in Colliers Hill by providing regional detention for the area. It basically has a a kind of you know? And I'm not the not the public works person working on this, not an expert, but my understanding is the culvert that conveys the water is too big and slightly too low, and that's resulting in higher than acceptable flows in the case of a hundred year storm event. And so what the project's doing is rightsizing the culvert so that drainage flows fall within the acceptable levels determined by the town. And with that, I turn it over to you all for questions and discussion.

All right. Sounds good. Thank you. I'll see if any of the commissioners have questions tonight. This is a lot simpler than the town budget

and all the back and

forth and study sessions we have for sure.

Commissioner Mortalero. So the economic incentive for nine miles, obviously, the highest biggest part of the budget, and that goes to repay the bonds. How long is that bond?

Just give me one second. So right now, as of when we last received TIF revenue, which was in September, we had paid off about 42% of our obligation to the 9 Mile Metro District, how much TIF revenue we agreed to pay them. And based on the annual rate of revenue coming in, we're anticipating that we'll be done paying the Nine Mile Metro District in about five and a half to six years.

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Yep. Alright. Seeing there's no other questions, I'm gonna see if there's a motion to approve resolution twenty five zero three nine.

So move.

Second. Alright. We have a motion and a second. Any further discussion?

Do you ever open the public hearing?

Oh, is this a public hearing? It is a public hearing. And you know I went through the whole motion. I did not officially open the public hearing. So let me I'm looking to our attorneys, so I make sure I do this right. I'm opening our public hearing. I'm stating that we had no one that was had signed up to address us on this topic. We had the presentation. We asked for a question. I'm closing the public hearing. Thank you. We now have a motion and a second to approve the resolution. Are we good? Yes. Alright.

I'm sorry. I missed who made the the motion and the second. Because I was thinking the same thing.

We didn't know. And I think, commissioner Hoback had a second.

Who you were the motion?

Commissioner Hoback. All right. We all good? All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say no. All right. Motion carries. We have a 2026 budget. We're going move on to the second item tonight which is 25,618, a public hearing resolution of the Board of Commissioners of the Towne Erie Urban Renewal Authority providing for supplemental appropriations for the 2025 budget year. And so I will open the public hearing at this point, and I will turn it right back over to you.

Yeah. Thank you. So hopefully, this supplemental appropriation will be even simpler and straightforward. Don't have a presentation tonight, so I'll just run you through the line items very briefly. So there's basically just some additional revenues in the Colliers Hill plan area for investment income.

There's some additional revenues in the historic Old Town URA for investment income. Additional expenditures in both of those for projects. They're small increases. Dollars 1,500 for the signalization project of the Weld County Road 5 and Colliers Parkway signalization, and then $9,000 of additional budget in the Old Town Improvements project. Just to be clear, there's still plenty of money in the bond project fund.

It's just based on the the budgeted expenditures. We're $9,000 over. And then the big ticket item, which I just wanna address and explain, is a $1,300,000 reduction in royalties in the URA for Highway 287 or 9 Mile. So just to be very clear, this is pretty much purely an accounting thing. So when we created the 2025 budget, I was anticipating that the King Soopers was opening, and additional revenues would come through the URA and be recorded as revenues in the URA.

However, the agreement for Highway 287 does not pledge any of the sales tax revenues from the King Soopers, to the repayment of those bonds, to the 9 Mile Metropolitan District. So the URA never records those sales taxes as revenues. They remain in the general fund, for use by the town, and for sharing, with the city of Lafayette as dictated by the the global settlement agreement in IGA. So this is not going to have any impact on the timeline of paying off the bonds, paying off our obligation to the nine mile metropolitan district. It will not have any impact on the health of the URA fund or the Highway 2879 mile plan area.

But we just wanted to get that straightened out.

All right. Sounds good. I'll see if there's any public comment. Has anyone signed up tonight? No. All right. Then I'll bring it back to the commission, see if there's any questions. All right. With that, I will close the public hearing. I'll see if there's a motion to approve Resolution 25,040. So

moved. Second.

We have a motion and a second. All in favor, Aye. All opposed say no. All right, motion carries. And with that, we will adjourn the URA meeting.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.