Redevelopment Authority - Regular Meeting

Hello, public. It is now 06:03. We have a quorum, consisting of Mike, Rick, Daniel, and Jerry. And so we'll start. If the others, join, that'll be great. So I don't see anybody here from the public. So move on to approval of the minutes. So move. Second. All in favor, aye.

Aye. That

that passed unanimously.

Is is there a motion right now?

Jerry?

Jerry. Jerry. Okay.

That moves us to number five, our business items. ID number 25Dash23084. Update on redevelopment authority loan program. One Yep.

Not a problem. Jennifer's on vacation, so I'm doing it all here.

But I'm allergic to. So it's been a tough couple weeks.

Well, here comes

here comes Paul. We'll add him.

Sorry for my license. We just just kicked it off.

Traffic. Yeah. Stadium area is pretty hateful tonight.

Yeah. Especially going from three to two lanes now. Yeah.

This construction. Yeah. Both ways.

All day long. So here's our loan and grant balances. The only biggest change would be commitment from the last meeting from the affordable housing development fund to Cherry Faith for the Meadow Lane project. Again, the money is still in we're holding money till building permit issuance. So if the project doesn't go forward, the money is gets put back in here. So that's dropped to $5.61 $7.80. That also reflects the four loans we have out to. They're construction loans. Those usually are about eighteen months back. I think every lot at Dominica Park now has a permit and is towards completion.

That'll be done by end of next year. That'll be all all the houses will be up and all will be occupied by Habitat families, which are gonna be $800,000 plus interest back into our program here. As for the HODAG rental rehab, not a lot of activity in there. We usually get a big payment

at the

end of the year from Berkshire Kensington, so that'll add another 80,000 ish to that. For our housing rehab, we haven't really done any loans, we are collecting some payments on those. And we also have some loans we think where people are just just done with work but haven't closed out their loan. So our staff is working on contacting them to kinda free up some additional money in there. We also have two people who have loans who never used any money, and we've reached out.

Are you using the money? Nobody no response. So we're we're planning to satisfy those mortgages too to free up that money. And then storefront activation, we did I just had one guy add, like, 10,000 to his loan, but, otherwise, not a lot of activation on that. But we are getting significant repayments every month on that, so that should build up fairly quickly.

We've talked to a few people about using it for some upcoming projects that are happening downtown. So, hopefully, we can get some money more money in that and get it back out to to some of these storefronts that we've we've been talking to. We're looking just for additional funding to get on on the projects. Any questions on this? No.

No? Excuse

me. Gotta move on to the next agenda.

Seeing no questions on that, then we will move on to ID25Dash02528. Review and act on a request by revitalizing Milwaukee for grant from the affordable housing rehab program to assist with the rehabilitation of homes in Waukesha as part of their twenty twenty six block building event.

K. A little bit of background. This last year, Revitalize Milwaukee approached the city about doing a block build. At this time, we didn't we didn't have financial commitment or anything. We didn't know anything about the organization just from what other than what we've read on the Internet about them. So they really wanted to move. They've been doing projects in Milwaukee where they come into a neighborhood and rehab houses. They've been doing it for several years. So they wanted to get into Waukesha and look at some of our low to moderate income neighborhoods. So Alderman Doreen, the mayor, and myself, and the fielders kinda championed this through the approval process to make it a cosponsored event with the city and revitalized Milwaukee, which helped them kinda with some of the street closures and things like that.

Because otherwise, they wouldn't have been eligible for a street closure for the two days that they have it closed. And what they do the reason for the street closure is because they're putting dumpsters, stacks of equipment, all over the streets. And they just so it's a two day of it's about a day and a half event. They're usually done by midday Saturday, and they bring hundreds of volunteers onto volunteers, contractors onto the site. So last year, we did this Main Street Perkins Strand neighborhood just east of downtown, and you can kinda see the the blue areas, the neighborhood we targeted.

The cross the hash mark ones are just ones that are owner occupied. They focus on owner occupied because that's who's gonna give them permission to work on their houses. So that's one of the things when they're looking at neighborhoods, they wanna at least have around 50% of owner occupied homes because then they can go do that. There's no cost to the homeowners on this. So it's really just coming in, not only fixing up interior things, but kinda sprucing up the neighborhood and the properties, you know, taking out old trees and things like that. So it's pretty pretty major event and very successful. Towards the end of this, have some video. I'll just kinda I'll run the video through. Hopefully, it works. So due to the success, this don't wanna come back.

So they approached us about, is there any way the city has any funds for this? And we had to brainstorm, like, what do I wanna set aside for this? But we kinda thought it was similar to what we've done with Habitat and their critical repairs. This is kind of similar thing to doing critical repairs. The only thing is they're doing it over the course of two days. In this case, they hit nine homes, so they're able to rehab nine home in this neighborhood over the course of a day and a half. And the sheer amount of workers on there makes it possible to do it that quick. Jeff, excuse me. Yeah. Can you go back

to that screen a second? Yeah. By Perkins and The Strand, that's a parking lot. Correct?

The one right at the corner? Actually, so there's a few parking lots here. There's one at the corner.

Let's see.

My my question is

This these are all part vacant parking lots. Yeah. Who owns that land? This one here is owned by I'm not sure the actual entity name is the guy who owns Waukesha. We actually I know we've talked to other developers about this, and there's some possible contamination there. So that's why it hasn't really moved. There's an approved project done here maybe eight years ago. Like, we had approved project for some side by, like, like, apartments. Like, I don't know. The eight units of apartments lined up because they own the they own the parking lot and then the two green space ones that are very next to it. But nothing's really moved on there, and we've talked to other people about I think there's you know? And then the owners seem to be selling kinda decides he doesn't wanna sell. So there's

a lot of a private party that owns it. I well, it wasn't part of the old Navistar then.

No. The other parking lots, though, these this is these are owned by Navistar or whatever company has it. Mhmm. So these parking lots are owned by them.

Do they Do we want those?

We'd we'd actually talked to them a little bit about that right now. We're kinda I mean, we've kinda held off on it because there isn't anything we can do with them right now. It's something that they've had they've had somebody. Was like, oh, can we sell to somebody you to do storage there? I'm like, no. We're not gonna approve that there because it's right next to a neighborhood, we don't Right. So I think they're gonna hold on to them until they get that site cleaned up, which we don't have a time frame on, but it's one of the more contaminated sites in the state right now according to the we met the DNR, and they told us it's a

And they're responsible to clean the site? Totally?

Yeah. So we'd like to eventually see this all redeveloped. It's just a matter of how bad is it contaminated, what level of cleanup we'll get to stuff. Mean, are we ever gonna be able to do housing on there or something else? We don't know. We don't know those answers yet. Mhmm. Yeah. Ideally, it'd be it will be cleaned up to the point where we can develop it.

What kind of contamination is on that plant?

This I don't know the full extent of it because they haven't checked under the buildings yet. Always done there. Plus some foundries, and there's a lot of groundwater. So there's a you see that stream that kinda comes up, kinda crosses Cleveland there? That goes underground and runs through the site and pops back out in Frank Park. There's another adjacent property that potentially is also contaminating it. So with the groundwater, it's moving. So there's you know? And this site, it actually the Navistar actually impacted that bear development. Those apartments, White Rock and Moorland, they actually had to do some cleanup there to develop because of that groundwater contamination.

So it's kind of a mess over there. But and I don't know if we have talked to them in the last couple years, but, yeah, those sites, we would like to see those sites redevelop this housing, but I think we're kinda holding off to see what happens with the rest of it. And I think they're waiting because they don't wanna sell them until they figure out what's going on for us. Is

there a concern that water's gonna migrate?

I think it's already migrating. I don't know how far. I think it's already moving around, like, migrating. Yeah. Because it's flowing through a stream. So we don't know the extent of everything, but I can tell you if those buildings out, they're not gonna know the full extent of the contamination because they haven't done any soil boring underneath the foundations, and most of that property was buildings. So But I think it'd be that's a great redevelopment. I'm looking at how many several blocks long, very big. I agree. Kind of a a normal shape. And then see if it's adjacent to frame part. Is that, what, four

or five acres?

No. It's, like, bigger than that. I wanna say 17 or 12 or 12. I don't know the exact number. It's over 10. Because they also own some of the property to the north, but not all of them. They own a couple of those parcels to the north. And then, you know, so those parking I think parking lots are, like, good, you know, side by sides or townhome type things, something that ties back in the neighborhood. Even though on the strand, there's a mix of commercial, manufacturing, residential, I think those sites would be good for residential. K.

You. So hold on. So they had asked if the city would have any way to contribute to this. And upon brainstorming, we thought, oh, we could kinda treat it similar to what Habitat has done. Now they're gonna track her end of getting stuff done because last year, we don't wanna

give any money if we didn't

know anything about it. So we thought we'd do something similar to what we did with Habitat instead of 50,000. We could offer potentially 30 from the rehab program. We have a fund balance of $1.85. We thought 30 would be a good amount. It would still allow us to make loans to homeowners, but we wanna bring it to the RDA to get your thoughts on it. And then as part of that, we really wanted to just make sure that their our money was protected or being used in a in a good manner. So we asked them, and they agreed to all these terms that we want them to provide a match of 30,000 with us through. Home Depot is one of their big sponsors through Home Depot donations, sponsorships in kind. I got an email from the day that they've already committed.

They've already found a $30,000 worth of a match. So on that. We also since our program is funded with affordable housing just affordable housing dollars, it has to be used for affordable housing. We want them to make sure they're doing income verifications for any of the selected homes, which we require for any of our any of our loan group recipients. So they have to be at or below our threshold that we've established for that.

We also want them to submit the list of the homeowners, income verification prior to any fund disbursement. The reason for that is we have some other older loan programs. We don't want someone who's owes us a bunch of money to keep, you know, getting funds. So we and it also helps us to keep record when they're that they're verifying the income. And then also so we can kinda manage, okay, what what was done with this money and keep track of that, know, because we kinda try to keep track of everything that was done with our loan program.

So we report to the council every year to an okay. Here's where the funds are being used. Here's what project most people are using them for. Again, the funds are only to be used for improvements to home and properties, so that could improve improvements to the building or to the property. Lot a lot of times, there's, like, tree removal, grading, and drainage issues, so we're fine with them using that.

And our program allows use of that, so we wanna limit those funds. We don't want the funds being used for other things that are related to fixing up fixing up homes. And then we want to revitalize this sort of report to the city. This would entail various things like how much what other donations and sponsors that our sponsorships that our funds help leverage, how much how much was spent on each home, things like that. So just so we have our our reports, we can bring it back to the RDA and say, here's what here's what those funds were used for. I put an example of let's see. Skip Let's ahead here. This is kind of an example we had we do with Habitat. Took our funds. Every one of them got, like, $5,000 grant from us, and then we wanted to show how that 5,000 leveraged additional money.

So we wanna do that with revitalize as well. So we have not picked a neighborhood. We're still looking at a few of them. These were two that we proposed last year as well. These two. The one we really like we'd like to use it on is this sort of Main Street down to Arcadian, down to Broadway, kind of an odd shape. But if you guys see, there's lot of home and some rehab in that area. There's some investment happening there with La Casa continuing to improve their their campus there. Also, Habitat's done some work on Main Street. One of the projects we help on, like, we give a construction loan to.

So we think this would be a good one with, you know, very impactful because you've got a couple of gateway streets in Main Street, Arcadia, and Broadway that are kinda adjacent to this. So that was one of them. The other one is the neighborhood down in the hill here down in Barstow from City Hall. So it kinda this is this is Metal Tech. This is so it'd be all these homes that are kinda down the hill from City Hall here with Barstow and then Saint Paul North Street.

There are some commercial properties here. We got North Pillar Brewery, which is kind of a new investment in the area, but this might be another area to do some cleanup. The third one we just talked about recently for this year was this is the Saratoga Softball Complex and STEM STEM school. And then this whole neighborhood here, driving through there, there's a lot of homes that could probably use rehab either too going all the way over to West Avenue and then up to college. We're still looking we'll probably still look for some more neighborhoods and get get their thoughts on it, do analysis of owner occupancy here.

But those are our initial ones, and we welcome if anybody has any ideas for their neighborhoods because they're really looking to us find out these neighborhoods. They're not finding them on their own. They're talking to staff and aldermen on okay. What what neighborhoods really need this? So Can I ask one question?

Yeah. Jeff, is this mostly for the exterior homes? Is there anything that's gonna

go on inside? They do inside work as well. Mhmm. So they're doing, you know, electric upgrades to electrical. They're putting they maybe putting in new water heaters. So if you know anything that's kind of a critical repair, they're they're trying to do here. Outside, they're in critical repair, but they're also sprucing things up. So it's not like you're putting a roof on a house that's got siding that's falling off for a bad repair. So they'll be coming in and painting things. So Fantastic. And then I wanna try to play this video here, and we'll see if the sound or the video work. I just hope the sound works.

Good morning, Waukesha. Today is more than a project completed or a house repaired. It is a reflection of what happens when a community comes together with heart, purpose, and compassion.

We're here in a block clear faces. We're in a neighborhood.

But we're all from different neighborhoods. We're all different from different areas. We're all from different companies and organizations and groups. But here's the community. The person you're right and the person you're left, that's the community. And when we can come together, that's where the change happens.

Welcome to Blackfield Waukesha. This is our do to to be

that.

You think about all that's going on in the world today, you would think that there's nowhere in the world, especially in The United States or Wisconsin, people would come together to help one another just out of love of community. And that's what we're seeing today.

This is a community event that makes our community much stronger. So thank you so much to Revitalize Milwaukee, the sponsors, every single person working, and the homeowners too.

So Jeff revitalized. They go in and they identify the the need and the work that's gonna be done ahead of time?

Yes. Okay. So what what they did last year is they didn't outreach to the neighborhood. The neighborhood is skeptical. They like, well, what is this? We've never heard of this. This is a scam. Somebody else can scam myself. But, you know, like a fly by night contract or something. So at first, they're having a hard time. Well, then all their

all the people

said, well, let me let me go and talk to the neighbor and gave her a map of what it was. And she went door to door and talked to people, and then that got people excited once they had a local face saying this is legitimate. You don't have to pay anything for this. They really were able to get that neighborhood support at that point because we probably always want to neighborhood people aren't aren't answering their doors or anything. So we we did a mailing address to people from the mayor and and Alderman Richardson.

So so I think this year, now we've got, you know, a track record that works. So I think that's they'll identify them they'll identify them, then they kinda go and knock door to door and stuff. So but they talk to everybody in the neighborhood that they could get ahold of. So it's not just them, oh, this looks kinda dumpy on it's them going door to door and saying, hey. Do you have any home? Because you can't see inside. Do have any improvements you need? You know, what issues are you having with your home? So it's a pretty robust outreach that they've done.

Well, it it seems to me that it would be that it has been successful in 2025. I would be supportive of it again this year.

Yeah. And then these are kind of our our conditions, which is that slide I showed you before. Just making sure that our just to protect our funds that they're not being used for other things. So really focusing what they're used for and making sure they're reporting back to us what they're used for. And following with the parameters of what our program would allow. Similar. We did Was there a

grant last year? What's that? Was there a grant last year?

Money last year, actually, weren't sure about the amount. This year, now that's kinda got a tracker here, I think. We were comfortable with the 30,000 a month. We don't wanna go a whole lot higher just because we wanna have that money reserved too for homeowners here who need to access the loans. We also offered them on here with this money. The homeowners, if the projects are too big for revitalize take on that they could apply for one of our loan programs. If it's the landlords, they could apply for the rental rehab program. And if it's the homeowner, they could also say, okay. Revitalize is gonna cover this, but I need this, this, and this, and then get a loan for that. So

Any questions? No. I think it's a

good call.

Thanks. Yeah. I think I thought you said earlier that it was only for owner occupied home. Is that correct? And then you just mentioned landlord.

That's what they target, but then if they're going around door to door and there's a I'll say a rental property, it's not in good condition. Our money this money wouldn't be used for it, but our rental rehab program, we could give them loan money for that. Okay. So see, they're going to the neighborhood and they find this house. And there's a landlord say there's a landlord that lives there or that doesn't live there where it's like, oh, I'd like to or the homeowners talk to landlord about this. And the landlord's like, we'd like to be part of the block build. You know, revitalize is gonna probably say, well, no. But the city now has city has this rental rehab. So it's kinda more of them letting people know that we have that funding. Okay. But, yeah, this money would only be used typically for a more I I guess that's what revitalize Milwaukee targets. They said, you know, because unless they have a willing landlord, it's pretty hard to do this and a lot of times landlords aren't really willing to do it.

Okay.

And then the other question I had, you mentioned that they would give you a list of the homeowners and then you would vet that list to see if they had some other outstanding loans or something, but I don't see that here on a requirement.

Those are really just our our because we there's situations where they may have an outstanding loan and they need small. So we we just kinda wanna know what it is. We've actually had people who maybe have two loans with the city And there's not an issue with it, then we're not gonna block them. We just wanna make sure that it's like someone who doesn't owe us, like, a bunch of money and hasn't been making payments or something like that. Well, most of our loans are deferred, so we don't really have a lot of those situations or feel back taxes. You know, those are the types of things we'd to identify and then try to find a resolution before you're saying we're not gonna do anything. But that's why I didn't put that in there.

And by way of choosing the neighborhoods, are are you then asking for the redevelopment authority to approve the funding prior to you figuring out which neighborhood you're you're targeting?

Yeah. We're just we're just a commitment. We're not gonna none of the money will go out right now, but just the commitment to put $30,000 to this. We come back. I mean, whenever they pick a neighborhood, they already know this the neighborhood they pick. We're gonna make sure those neighborhoods and this is their thing too, that those neighborhoods are identified as HUD designated low and moderate income neighborhoods Okay. Which is pretty much all of them. They just do work in those types make the motion? You didn't? No. I I'd like make

the motion that we set $30,000 aside for this type of program in the future.

Is there a second, Summer?

A second. Okay.

So we have a a motion by Jerry and a second by Mike. So we can vote on it if there's any questions. K. All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Passed unanimously.

Okay. Last item. Alright. This one is just just some some minor changes to our affordable housing development fund program, and it's really triggered by what we've seen for projects. That program, this 2022 is when we adopted it, went through council.

The this is the one that's intended to create more units, whereas the previous one we're just talking about was to rehab existing units. So some of the eligible uses like ant land acquisition, site prep, housing construction, converting things to to housing units, rapid rehousing, which is getting developers to maybe set aside a unit in a large development So someone who's about to become homeless can be quickly put into a living situation and then transition down into a permanent living living situation, so they don't go homeless. Grants or loans to developers and neighborhood improvement. So what we've been finding is we've had Habitat's used a lot of a lot of this with those loan those construction loans. We get them paid back eighteen months, then they're lending them back out to Habitat, and then we retain that interest to make more loans.

And with those, we tied those to building permits. With one of those approved at the last meeting, tied to building permits. And the reason we've been doing that is because we don't have a lot of money in this fund. It seems like a lot, but we don't have a ton of there. And we don't want it to be, you know, committed to a project that maybe isn't gonna happen.

Or we send out money, and then that project doesn't happen, we're stuck. It's, like, maybe the second or third mortgage on this property, and say it goes belly up before you go get to construction, we may not see our money again. So we've done this with tax incremental finance districts too where we tie the release of city funds to developers to building permits. So we had thought for this program, we'll kinda tie the release of the funds to to the issuance of billing parts. That's the way we've done every one of our loans so far. This really is, like, kinda putting us in a good position that, okay, this project's ready to go. They've they've spent the money. Financing's in order. You can use the money then. You know, we can issue the money down at building products.

We know we have a project that's going to get those funds back to us. The rationale is really providing clarity to developers because right now, it's just general policy without a lot of guidelines on how how's this money we release. So it's kind of the RDAs and staff are looking at each application, and we've kind of found that we really like to tie it to building permits. And then also kinda putting us a last dollar in. So they look they're exhausting all their other funding opportunities, whether it's home funds, it's other CDBG funding, it's growth Waukesha County Center for Growth, the growth fund.

So I'm trying to get them to get other funding, and we're kinda, like, the last, you know, kind of the last piece of the puzzle. And then so, really, what we thought, though, because I don't wanna get rid of because we have a lot of activities in there. It could be, like, property assemblage, phase one and two, things like that. What that would happen before they get building permits. So we thought and we've done this with tax finance too where you can get reimbursed.

Say you get to building permits. It's a reimbursable expense. So they we we had given them we have a lot of chunk of money to them. If they really wanna go back and do it, get reimbursed for their, you know, say their site site work or engineering work, engineering plans that they could get the money and use it as a reimbursable expense. Or what, like, Habitat's been doing, using it for the site work, construction. They come in. They've done they paid for all other stuff they've had that done in order to give them money that they can use to get the construction done. Either way, the money won't go out till they have building permits. And then also one allowed exception for RDA approval. So if someone comes in, they need you know, that there's, like, something they need to make the project happen, RDA can say, okay.

In this case, we'll get release a certain amount of the money before billing permits. In that case, they would have to own a property because then we'll have because we'll have to a junior mortgage on that property to secure those funds. And then these funds also can be used by the RDA, not just developers. So we put it does not apply to RDAs to these funds. The reason for that is this is one of the pots of money that we could potentially use our acquisition. You know, the acquisition policy, bringing that to the council in December, the authority for RDA to purchase property. So we would not want us to be tied to building permits because, one, we're not pulling building permits. And, two, it would help us. Okay. Say there's a developer and a lot next to it that we think, oh, this will make the development better.

We can acquire that using these funds without being tied to building permits. So that's the reason we put that RDA thing on it. Does not apply to RDA. Really, just to give developers clarity on this and to make sure our money just knock on the door and maybe never never do be returned to us again. That's kind of what our concern is. We haven't had any concerns. Even this has raised those concern. We just think it's since we were doing that with tax incremental districts, mostly requiring them at building codes to trigger for release of funds. We thought that'd be a good way to kinda make sure these funds are also being used for the intended purpose. So our regulations to adopting that policy change tie into billing permits and then exempting our use of the funds for that.

So that's the affordable housing development fund Yes. Changes that has approximately 561,000 in it?

Correct. K. And then we've been we kinda you know, with the last one that was approved, we put a deadline on it. You know, bill reports must be issued by this. He he'd actually proposed a date. So at least that money yeah. It might be tied up for I think it's October year. I think it's only up for the deadline, like, year from us granting it. Mhmm. There's still a trick or two so that money won't sit out there for two or three years because they haven't pulled building points yet Within a year, they had to come back to the idea and say, okay. I'm close, and we can make the decision next October on that project. If progress hasn't been made on that, then we can come back and say, okay. You haven't made any progress on this. We're gonna resend the funds or not gonna extend it. Or if they're really close to the finish line, we can extend the funds.

Now for the one last month, I mean, he's already looking to go on a plan commission meeting for plan commission consultation, application submitted. So he'll probably be on December agenda for that. So that one seems to be moving forward, but it just gives us some additional protections. If there's any other changes to the policy, I probably should have attached the policy. Really just covers, you know, these uses and then gets into specifics on what these these uses mean.

Yeah. I think it's smart to tie it to that because otherwise, you could just go through a feasibility study using all those using those funds and then not realizing any kind of actual project. Yeah. So I agree with it. That's our fear just because it's just the funds only get replenished when you get paid back or if the council were to extend another other tip districts for that one year

for extension.

We have some coming up maybe two years down the road. They're probably big enough to make a a good batch to add some more money in here. But a lot of our more recent ones have been single property or two property districts. For a specific project, you'll get the Mandel Bridge Walk down on the river. That's one parcel. So when that's paid off, it's the city of Toadawi, is it worth the one year extension on this? Are we gonna have enough money back to make it to make it worthwhile to fill to do these funds? We look at any any any district that's gonna close. We meet with finance, and we look at it and say, does it make sense to try to extend this? And then it will go through common council if if the decision is yes.

If there's not any other questions, I would make a motion to act on the proposed changes to the RDA affordable housing development fund program. Second. Jerry seconds that. Any further questions?

No. All

those in favor?

Aye. Aye.

That passes five to zero. And, Jeff, do you have any communications or anybody have any referrals? Any objections to adjourning? No? No. That's five to zero. We're done. Short and

sweet.

Yep.