City Council - Regular Meeting

showing me Council will call this main order for the record it is May 19 2026 at 4.30 PM. We'll begin this afternoon's work session with roll call tenants.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Councilman Cavanaugh. Here. Councilman Taylor. Here. Councilwoman Strader. Here. Councilman Whitlock.

Present.

Councilwoman Little-Roberts.

Here.

Councilman Overton. Here. Mayor Simison.

Here. Next item is adoption of the agenda.

Mr. Mayor. Councilman Overton. There are no changes to tonight's agenda. I move that we adopt the agenda as published.

I have a motion and a second to adopt the agenda. Is there any discussion? If not, all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, nay. You guys have it, and the agenda is agreed to. Up next is the consent agenda.

Mr. Mayor. Councilman Overton. There are no changes to tonight's consent agenda. I move that we approve the consent agenda for the mayor to sign and the clerk to attest. Second.

I have a motion and a second to approve the consent agenda. Is there any discussion? If not, all in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed, nay. The ayes have it. And the consent agenda is agreed to. There are no items moved off the consent agenda. So we will go into department reports first time up. And really the only item under that is item 10 in business improvement district presentation and discussion. Turning this over to Mr. Calder.

Thank you, Mayor and City Council. I'm up here a lot lately, but thanks for having me. This is a PowerPoint presentation based upon your council memo that was in your packet. This will go into a little bit more detail, but before I start the presentation, just a little bit of context. Business Improvement Districts as you probably well know, are not a new concept either in America or Idaho. There's quite a few Idaho cities that have business improvement districts. Some of them are probably more successful than others, but nonetheless, there's quite a few of them. Secondly, one of the things that you might ask is, well, why now? Why would we want to be talking about a business improvement district? We haven't had one. We've had some discussions over the years, but they've never really, you know, gained traction. But one of the things that is occurring at the end of this calendar year is that the URD, the oldest URD in the downtown, is expiring in 2026. And that's kind of how the conversation started. The mayor and I, probably about a year ago, having that conversation, is there another tool or is there something out there that can maybe not replace what a URD does, but some aspects of that in the downtown? So a good example would be I've had situations where a business owner has wanted to replace a trash can because a car hit it or something and it's damaged. It's still functional, but it doesn't look good. We had the ability to go to MDC, say, hey, is there some funds available to pay for this replacement of the trash can? they go to the MDC board, MDC board can approve it. Parks department can help replace it. So it was kind of a partnership and it gets replaced. So things as simple as that to some, to some things that might be more complicated. So that's kind of why answers the why now, um, But it is something that as we went out and engaged the downtown businesses and tried to focus on property owners where we could, but sometimes it was just the businesses who are leasing property, a lot of confusion about well, what does MDC and the URD do, and what would a BID do, and what does the city do? So there's a lot of education there. So keeping that in mind, that's the context of this presentation, and it is pretty high level. So if you have any questions, feel free to stop me. We can get into more detail. So first question, what is a business improvement district? So in 1980, Idaho legislature passed the code that established the business improvement district law. That's what authorizes all incorporated cities in Idaho to establish these organizations. Essentially, they're publicly sanctioned yet privately directed organizations that supplement public services to improve shared geographically defined outdoor public spaces. They can also do projects as well. They're funded primarily through voluntary assessments, which are called special assessments, just like in the recent CPACE program you guys approved, the same terminology. And then additionally, BIDs can be funded through event and sponsorship revenue, donations, grants, and voluntary memberships. So a great example of that is Indian Creek Plaza. If you go to Indian Creek Plaza, yes, they're a BID, but if you look around, you see all the sponsorships. They get a significant amount of money from their sponsorships. They also get donations. There's a way to donate to their project area. And then I've just noted these three, but there's a lot more in Idaho. Boise, Nampa, and Caldwell all have active business improvement districts, and those are what the logos are below. So this question came up again when we were visiting with downtown property owners and businesses. What about urban renewal districts? So just so there's no confusion for the public or for anyone else here, those are tax increment districts, a completely different animal, different statute. And although BIDs are oftentimes located within urban renewal districts, Urban renewal districts expire and BIDs don't have to expire. They can be perpetual. So in the case of Caldwell, at least one of their BIDs is in a former URD. So it's a little bit confusing for people that might have businesses within there. But they are separate organizations and they operate independently. And then unlike urban renewal districts, BIDs are not tax increment tools. They have nothing to do with tax increment. And as I noted earlier, Meridian's oldest URD, Meridian Urban Renewal Number 1, expires at the end of this calendar year. How is it created? So in Idaho, the process to establish a BID begins with a petition for the proposed district boundaries, uses, and estimated costs. And then as outlined in the code, the initiating petition must include signatures from business operators or business property owners in the proposed district who would pay at least 50% of the proposed special assessments. And that's kind of confusing, and I have a slide that will explain that better here in a minute. After receiving the valid initiation petition, the city council would adopt a resolution of intention to establish a district, hold a hearing to consider the establishment of a district, and adopt an ordinance to establish a district. And then once established, City Council have has sole discretion as to how the revenue derived from the business improvement district is to be used but may appoint new or existing advisory boards or commissions to make recommendations as to its use and also the statute allows the city to contract with the Chamber of Commerce or similar business Association operating primarily within the bid boundaries to manage day to day operations. So this is a little visual on how that petition works, just so everybody's clear. In this example, there's 10 parcels, four of which are residential, which would not pay the fee. The other six commercial parcels, they would be presented with a petition. Those are some arbitrary numbers of a fee that would be paid. Bigger parcels would pay more, smaller parcels would pay less. And in this example, the two largest parcels signed the petition. All the other commercial parcels don't because they're in disagreement. But yet when you total up the mathematics here, so that would generate $370.00. Half of 370 is $185. The two largest parcels generate 190, so their vote is 51.35%. So per the statute, two parcels out of 10... have essentially initiated the petition successfully. Now, that's not what a lot of councils would like to see. You'd want to see 80% or 90%. But just so everyone understands how you get there, it's not just 50% of the parcels and you're good to go. It could be two big large ones or a bunch of small ones. There's different ways to get there.

Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Schroeder.

Just really quick before we move on, I just want to make sure I understand, is it based on the value of the property or how does that voting work?

Yeah, so that's a great question because the statute allows you to create the fees in a lot of different ways. And so, for example, Nampa, the city of Nampa, when they had a first-generation business improvement district, they just had a flat fee for every parcel, you know, $200 or $300. You can do it that way. It's probably not very equitable, but that's one way of doing it. another way of doing it which is now how nampa and caldwell does it is a percentage of your assessed valuation a very small percentage of it and so that's when we get into that discussion and you look at this map that i'm presenting here that's how we've come up with these numbers we're doing a very small percentage of the assessed valuation which changes from year to year it can go up it can go down in some cases probably doesn't go down very often. But that's one way to get there. And then in Boise's case, because they have a lot of vertical properties, they do it on a square foot basis based on their commercial because they have sometimes residential on top, which residential is exempted. So in this map, I know it's hard to see.

Curtis, before we go on, just to put a finer point so that we all understand. But for the initiating petition, is that decided before it is because we set the boundaries and ask people to do the petition? Or is it those decisions made on what you charge through the process?

So that's a great question. So in order to have a successful initiating process, you're going to have to know what the fees are. So you're going to have to make that decision on how you're going to establish fees, as well as define the uses of the fees. In some cases, let's just say we wanted to use the money for special events. We could make it narrow enough where it's like we're going to charge everybody $300 a year and we're only going to use it for special events. You could do something that simple. In this instance, we've come up through over a year of looking at different boundaries, different ways to mathematically compute this. This is where we've kind of landed. Is this the final? No, because it's up to the property owners. the property owners would have to say, yes, this is how we want it presented. This is the uses to go along with it. And they would go out and actually get signatures on that initiation petition. And we can't really be involved in that part of it. We can be involved in helping with the maps, helping with, you know, the support services needed to get to that point. But that is going to be something in the petition. It'll have to say, this is the boundary, this is the fees, because you'll need to know the fees to calculate what the 50% is.

So council says the initial... parameters for the business or property owners to determine whether or not they want to sign the petition before they get to the hearing to make final determinations.

Actually, it's the businesses. Even if we weren't having this presentation, if the businesses wanted to get together and do their own petition and they brought it in, I wasn't here, and they met all the requirements, that would trigger the council to take action. In this case, we've kind of done some of the heavy lifting, met with a bunch of different property owners, tried to... you know, understand what their needs are in an effort to try to assist them to get to that point. So in essence, we're kind of setting the table, but they've got to actually sit down at the table and eat the food before they bring it back to the council. They could go out and do a petition and end up with 40%. You wouldn't even be able to accept it because it wouldn't meet the 50% threshold. So I know it's kind of convoluted, but that's how the statute works on this. So walking through this proposed BID boundary map, it looks a lot like the map you saw last week with the boundary overlay, with the exception it goes a little bit further to the north up to Fairview. And you can see that it has two different tiers. There's a tier one in the center. There's a tier two at the north and the south end. And what that does is replicates what other BIDs in the area are doing. It doesn't have to be structured at full assessment versus half assessment. It can be different ratios. But the concept is that people in the tier one area will get more value from their assessment fee. So they're going to pay more. People in the Tier 2 area, they're going to still pay a fee, but they're not going to see as much value in either services or projects, but they should pay something. In this case, we're just proposing, okay, they pay 50% of what Tier 1 pays. When we talked to most of the folks that we were visiting with, they were mostly in the tier one. We did talk to some people in the tier two. We talked to about 50 different property owners individually, and there was some support for this type of a concept because people on the northern end were like, yeah, we wouldn't get a lot of benefit from it, but we would get some benefit. So as long as we're not paying the full amount, we could probably get on board with that. So that's kind of how that worked. And we can come back to this too. We probably will have to when we start talking numbers. This is statutory. What can you use the BID revenue for? So let's say we have the Business Improvement District. We've generated all this money. What can you spend it on legally? You can spend it on a parking facility, not to say that anyone can because they're not going to generate that much money, but it is an allowable use. What you do see them spend it on is physical improvement and decoration of any public space in the district, so beautification. Promotion of public events, which are to take place on or in public places in the district, you would see a lot of that in BIDs. Good example would be Oktoberfest, the car show, those events that are already happening in our downtown would qualify. Acquisition and operation of transportation services to promote retail trade activities within the district. I'm not sure if, for example, these trolleys that go around downtowns, these motorized trolleys, maybe that's what was envisioned. And then of course, general promotion of retail trade activities in the district, which is very broad. The examples of allowable uses that are happening in the valley right now that we're very familiar with, special events, marketing, staffing, maintenance contracts, such as snow removal, sidewalk cleaning, administrative software to do the assessment collections, lighting upgrades, beautification projects. That's what you typically would see in a BID. But I think if you wanted to, you could use it for anything under the five allowable uses. So this is where we might have to go back to the map. But estimated levy rates, if we use the lowest rate that we calculated in that map, 0.001 of assessed valuation per parcel per year, or a minimum of $500. So if they... their assessment was only 385, they'd still pay 500. Or in the other case, if it was a large commercial property that maybe generated $20,000 per that formula, 5,000 would be the maximum. So capped at either end, 500 to 5,000. And then tier two, dividing that by two, so 50% of that, 0.0005 with a 250 minimum and a 2,500 annual, you come up with an initial projection of $121,000. And that's at the lowest calculation. We also factored in residential parcels, even though they're not charged, but those do convert over time. And so if all of those green parcels converted, that could be another $64,000. So you'd be 185. So when you apply a higher rate, so if you did a 0.0025, you're gonna jump it up to 219,735. If you're gonna go 0.033, That's going to be $266,800 annually. So you can see, depending on what rate you pick, you generate more revenue. So this is kind of a synopsis of the stakeholder outreach. And this is going to involve everything from meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, with their subcommittees, with their board, Meridian Development Corporation, mainly Ashley working closely with her, and then other stakeholders throughout the downtown area. And so we have property owners, businesses, we met with some of the nonprofits that wouldn't even be assessed, but just to get their feel for what they thought of it. And, you know, divide it into three buckets, concerns, interests, and themes, and what are the top three in each one of those. And so concerns, cost versus benefit. People don't want to pay a fee if they don't feel like they're getting a benefit from it. They don't want it just to go into a black hole towards overhead. Past negative experiences. There's some history in the downtown. I'm sure you're all aware of it more so than I. of other efforts, other boards not being able to successfully execute and finger pointing and things of that nature. Overlapping efforts between city and urban renewal agency. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that there's some people out there that say, well, what are my tax dollars going for? Of course the city should replace my garbage can and they should replace the banner. That's what I pay taxes for. So they don't understand what URD was paying for versus what city should pay for, what ACHD should pay for. There's a lot of confusion there. However, under interests, there was almost unanimous agreement that if a BID was established, that it should go towards special events and programming and activation of the downtown. They see Indian Creek Plaza and they go, we should be doing what Indian Creek Plaza is doing. Heard a lot of that. Visible, tangible improvements. Everything from minor, hey, I've got a broken sidewalk. How come it hasn't been fixed? Been walking over it for five years. Can the BID fix that? Yeah, the BID could if someone else didn't. And then beautification and clean sidewalks. I think we've all heard the complaints over the years of the sidewalk issue, especially on weekends and people coming in and the business owners having to clean up their own sidewalk from neighboring bars and things of that nature. That's something that in Boise's case, that's what their BID does a lot of is clean up after hours, snow removal, things of that nature to assist businesses. The themes, people were relatively open to it. There wasn't a ton of people that said no way, no how, but they were cautious. Said we're open, but, you know, within reason. Equity and fairness, for example, the people on the north and the south ends, they don't want to pay full freight for people, you know, that are getting a benefit right on Idaho Street, for example. then there was a theme with just frustration with past efforts of not being able to get something put together so that's kind of a taking 50 you know conversations and boiling it down to some some highlights there so everyone here knows this the public might not be aware but I'm counting five, there could be more than that, but five that I see all the time. Major projects, initiatives, or events that are occurring right now simultaneously within the next year or two. Meridian Development Corporation's revised destination downtown plan that has come before the board several times getting feedback on. Expiration of the oldest URD at the end of the year. Alquist and Pacific Companies Project, formerly Union 93, Nine Mile Creek Flood Mitigation Project, and then the Community Developments Downtown Overlay Project that you heard about last week. So, you know, any efforts on the Business Improvement District would need to be coordinated with these other efforts. We wouldn't want to be stepping on everybody's toes as we're going through this process, and we'd want to make sure that the property owners understood what our task was and not get it conflated with some of these other efforts. And then on top of this, if we were to pursue BID, we have had conversations with Idaho Commerce about what does Main Street America look like? Can that be implemented with a BID, without a BID? Is it something that would be valuable to our downtown? We believe it would be, but we'd want to kind of get the answer to the BID first because it might look differently. And I think that's about it. Next steps would be things I've already spoken about. Formation of the BID is intended to be a citizen-driven process at this point. We're prepared to work with stakeholders in a support role to advance to the initiation petition stage of the process. get there i would envision at least two town hall type events to try to get people in one room to have a discussion rather than trying to go out and have 50 individual conversations get some feedback make sure the boundary looks okay is the fee assessment what they were expecting do they it's a too high is it too low do they want a flat rate you know what what can we do there we can make those adjustments to to boundary to mapping tools other and perform other support activities but what we can't do is we can't be directly involved in the petition process so we've identified a few champions that said we will do it but they need the tools to do it and that's where we can probably help And so that's kind of where we're at today and open for questions, comments, et cetera.

Thank you, Curtis. Council, questions. Mr. Mayor. Councilman Taylor.

Thank you, Curtis. Appreciate it. I got a few questions here. I think one of them you answered already, but I'm just going to ask you to clarify. The party responsible for paying the assessed fees is the property owner, not the tenant of the the building. Is that correct?

It can actually be done both ways. And in our conversations with other BIDs, some of those are set up that way and they've all recommended don't do it that way. In your petition, make sure you designate just property owners because it's easier to collect from a property owner than a tenant. And that's something that the statute gives you that flexibility, but The recommendation is do just property.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. It's okay. I just have like three questions here. On managing a BID, I know we can contract with a chamber or some other business entity. Can you give me a sense in Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, who actually manages the BID? And then if there were a scenario here where BID, Maybe we don't have a business group or the Meridian Chamber is not interested. What do we do?

Yeah, so it can be done a couple different ways, and each one, Boise does it differently than Nampa. Nampa does it differently than Caldwell, and I'll go over that in a second. But typically, it's envisioned, I think, statutorily that the board, the city council could actually use an existing advisory board, for example. Let's say we had a downtown advisory board made up of downtown property owners. That board could be put together, and this is how Nampa does it. They have a board of downtown businesses. They're actually in charge of... day-to-day operations of the district. Now, they don't have really any employee per se, but they use the city's economic development staff to do things like the assessment billings They contract with their parks department to do garbage removal, cleaning of sidewalks. So there's some contractual obligations on the part of the city in Nampa. In Boise, they do it that way too, for the snow removal, for the sidewalk cleaning. Their BID contracts with the city of Boise to perform those functions, but they have a nonprofit board with staff that runs the organization, so it's much more formalized. Caldwell takes it even a step further where they've established a nonprofit called Destination Caldwell. They're the managing entity of the BID, primarily for the Indian Creek Plaza, but the BID boundaries go a little bit beyond that. And they work in concert with the city, but they have quite a bit of overhead with staff. They have maintenance staff for their ice skating rink. They have administrators that run the nonprofit. And so even though they pull in a lot of revenue, a lot of their revenue is expended on overhead. So in a very simplistic example and how when Julia was still here, we envisioned at least starting it as, hey, economic development staff could do some things. We can't run everything. But if there was a nonprofit board, whether it be the chamber or some other organization, they could do some of it. It could be a shared responsibility and we wouldn't consume a lot of the revenue and overhead.

So can be done. Can you clarify when you say contract with the city, like parks department to do something or economic development team, are we saying like the BID would actually contract with and pay the city for their services?

Yeah, that's how City of Boise and their BID works. They actually... I'm recalling this number, but it was a fairly large number, like $40,000 a year that the Boise downtown BID paid the city of Boise to do sidewalk cleaning, snow removal, and those things because they just didn't have the staff to do it.

I'll ask one more question, then I'll let my council members go. I still have some more. I wasn't quite sure when we were talking about establishing the boundaries and the fee structure. What I thought I heard was that the city council would need to initially decide what the fee structure would look like first. I might just be a little slow in tracking that because that's what I thought I heard is that if we were to move ahead with this and set this up, we actually would be deciding what that fee structure would be. And I might be misunderstanding.

You would be deciding on it at a later stage, almost retroactively, because it's really based, like I said, the property owners could put the petition together in a vacuum without our input or guidance. And if it met the statutory requirements... and it checked all the boxes, you guys would approve it and move on to the next steps of creating the BID. But it could be their idea, not our idea. We're proposing on behalf of staff, hey, this is a reasonable way, this is a reasonable boundary, this is a reasonable way to get to the assessment fee, but it's not the only way to skin the cat. And so... It's definitely a citizen-driven process, but we're trying to assist those citizens to come up with some sort of a proposal that would actually be functional and work. And I think that's why these efforts kind of die on the vine, is that a group of citizens can get together having a beer, and they go, wow, this is a great idea, this is a great idea. And then they go, well, who's going to do it? Well, I don't want to do it. I'm too busy, you know. And so then it just languishes. Whereas in this project exercise that the mayor and I've been talking about for a while, city staff in our spare time, we were going down and having those conversations. And a lot of times, some of these businesses aren't talking to one another. It was pretty clear in our conversations that some do, but some don't. And some of the big businesses don't. They're all on board, whereas some of the smaller businesses are like, well, gosh, I can't afford another fee. It'll put me out of business. I mean, that's how the wide range of comments we were getting. So, yeah, probably not a real clear answer to your question, but, yeah, it's something that we don't get to dictate to the businesses. They actually get to propose it to us, and if it meets the statutory requirements, then the council could approve it.

Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Willock.

Go on with that line of thinking. Again, I didn't see in the statute any rates being set. In your proposal, or your overview, it does talk about potential percentages and not to exceed certain amounts. And then at the bottom you had, or you could do a different percentage. And I'm assuming you could change the not to exceed amount as well. Correct. That's entirely... up to those businesses as they petition each other and decide what it is that they would like to

Yeah, and that's correct. And I think that when we get to that stage with the Allquist and Pacific companies project, you know, pending out there and we have the lofts and you have these mixed uses, I think in those larger commercial projects, you're probably going to have to come up with a square footage calculation like Boise does to make sure it's equitable because, you know, Laws, for example, when you look at the Ada County Assessor, those are all individually condoed and it's really hard to get a base level assessed valuation of what the commercial on the bottom would even be assessed at. You'd be guessing. And so probably for those types of scenarios, the commercial on the ground level going with kind of a Boise model of so many cents per square foot would be the assessment for them. Everyone else might be a percentage of assessed valuations. But it's definitely very flexible. The statute doesn't give a lot of guidance, but those are the three models that are used in the state of Idaho. Percent of assessed valuation, square footage, or a flat rate. And everyone that had the flat rate has advised us, don't do a flat rate. You don't generate enough money to do anything, and everybody just gets mad at the BID. How come we don't have anything? Well, we don't generate any money.

Mr. Mayor.

Councilwoman Lill-Roberts.

Mr. Mayor, Curtis, thank you so much for the presentation. I've got a few questions. You mentioned that the business owners are looking at doing more like event-type special things, and kind of compared it to Caldwell. And if I remember right, Caldwell started out with kind of creating the hardscapes that bring the numbers downtown. And started out with a pretty significant, because I remember some business owners or building owners kind of choked on the first assessment they got. And so is our downtown wanting to do Anything that's a hardscape to bring people downtown? Are they just looking at trying to figure out how to do events kind of as is?

Yeah, they would all love to have a place like Caldwell has a hardscape. Whether or not they'd be willing to, you know, pay the freight on that is a different question. But they, they're, of course, we're going through these conversations when we didn't know what was going on with Union 93. So You know, some of the primary first questions is what's going on with Union 93? How come there's weeds? How come it's not moving? You know, so we're dealing with that question. Now it's a little bit different environment. There is something that's going to happen there. The festival street concept may get implemented. The plaza may get implemented. So if something like that were to occur in conjunction with that project, now all of a sudden they do have some placemaking ability. And that's what that whole concept is, is Caldwell latched on to placemaking. We need a place to hold events. So they... Caldwell the city of Caldwell bankrolled the construction not the BID the BID was brought in more as an operator of it once it was established and BIDs just don't generate that much money so they really can't be expected to build parking structures and ice skating rinks and things of that nature my next question was going to be if the URD bankrolled it but you said the city did I think it was a combination, actually. And they did have a URD. It's since expired. And I think the URD and the city of Caldwell collaboratively found the funding to build the Indian Creek Plaza because there was a lot going on. There was a lot of shared responsibility when they did that.

I think that pretty much covers. Thank you.

And Council, I think, you know, just from my perspective on some of this, you know, I know, I think a lot of stuff is happening in our downtown and people come a little bit to expect money from the URD for events. You know, NBC has been a funder of a lot of the downtown events and activities. And, you know, I have stated this to Steve. This was the concerts on Broadway conversation was I did not see when the city started receiving revenue when the URD went away that we just intend to return that money back to supporting downtown events. That was not my intention with those funds. So that really is kind of what drove this is if they wanna keep having those events and having money for those events, this was really the fairest way we felt to try to have collaboration amongst our downtown business partners who in theory all received some value depending upon their involvement. compared to the city trying to continue to fund things in that manner. So I think that's where a lot of this conversation has been generated about is what's replacing the URD for funding of events. And they fund chamber events, they funded city events, They even funded other non-chamber, non-city events with their donations. And so that's kind of, in my mind, the base level conversation about what is the BID can they do to help fund things. The secondary was who's going to do it. I mean, I think that is where the chamber generally has been thought of as the place that would step in, but they also have their own needs and their own staffing, and it's got to be at a high enough level to support their staff to do the work if that's what it's going to be. So it's a delicate conversation all the way around. And if ultimately it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. But also I think it's important for our downtown businesses to understand, you know, we're putting together the FY27 budget for the city it does not have any money going into downtown events that were once funded by MBC in our city budget um so if this is the direction we want to go but they want those sponsored those dollars this is one way where this could help achieve that outcome Mr Mayor Councilman Cavanaugh Curtis one thanks for the presentation this is something I've got

have high interest in, but very little knowledge. So I appreciate you taking some time and walking us through and answering some questions.

And Mayor, I appreciate your added context as well.

Also, thanks for going and doing some like on the ground work with our downtown stakeholders. I think that is such a difference maker is to go really meet people where they are and communicate with them. In your presentation to us, you touched on some cities that do this really, really well. Right. Are there, I'm not looking for specific cities, but are there lessons learned that is important for council to consider? Maybe, again, a city that has went down this path that with the knowledge they have now, they would have done things differently that we need to be thinking about.

Yes. And I'll just use Caldwell because Caldwell, you know, that was one of the things we asked all the BIDs. If you had to do it again, would you do things differently? You know, a lot of the people we asked at Boise are like the 10th iteration of staff because they did it in the 80s. There was a lawsuit and there was a lot of history there that they didn't even know how they navigated it. But Caldwell's is new enough that one of the things that they pointed out was be careful about property owners versus businesses on the assessments like we talked about. The collections is a real issue. So not only is it an administrative overhead, it's something the city has to do. It's not something that the contractor does necessarily. So you have to have some level of, you know, it can be a pretty simplistic program. I mean, we're talking about 170 bills that go out. you know, once a year perhaps or quarterly or however you want to do it. So it can be something as simple as I set up a spreadsheet with everybody's name and address and we do a mass mailing and we get, you know, 70% of them back and they pay. Well, there's going to be a percentage that they don't pay and we're going to have to go spend a lot of extra time getting the collections. And that's what Caldwell struggles with to this day is that they don't get full collection. And there were people that were opposed to being in a BID from the get-go, and those people are still there. And they are not cooperative. Now, granted, they're a very small percentage because a lot of people see the success and they were great, or they've been replaced by other people that have come in and bought property and they're okay with it. But they said it's like a lot of things when you have that situation. You spend 80% of your time going after the 20% that don't want to cooperate. And one of the things that was interesting, because they've taken over the maintenance responsibility, like garbage collection, cleaning sidewalks, this and that. So some of those people will pay their fee. And let's say they're a low fee payer, like they pay, I think their minimum is $350 a year. The $350 a year people are sometimes the ones that expect $10,000 worth of service, and they're the ones calling every day. So that was what I gathered in our conversation with Destination Caldwell. If you set up your BID, do it a little bit differently to try to minimize that if you can. It's not going to be perfect. And they also mentioned the more people you get on board at the petition stage, yes, 50% is the statutory threshold. They said shoot for 80%, 90%. If you can get that, it'll make your life easier as you try to manage the ongoing operations.

Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Schrader.

Is the obligation to pay the fees a tax lien? Like how, like, how does that work? So I'm just curious, because like, if so, let's say that someone doesn't pay, does it attach to the property like a tax lien? And then when they try to sell the property, you have to clear that lien? Or like, how does that work?

So we asked that question of all of the BIDs and all of them gave kind of different answers because they're set up differently. So the ones that set it up with businesses, they don't really have anything to lean because it's a tenant and they're there one month and they're gone the next and they can't really because they didn't set it up with the property owner. They don't have any type of hammer. We have not advanced to the stage to get with legal to talk about can we do a legitimate lien on a property owner for a special assessment? Would we be able to really collect that? We've talked to Ada County of saying, hey, would you guys be willing to issued the assessments and they said, nope, we don't do special assessments. That's on the cities. So we do know that. And we, you know, we would love that Fayette County would do that, but they won't. So not a clear answer on if we were to lean them, if it would, if we could actually collect it at time of sale or when a new owner came in, but you might be holding onto that lean for a long time.

Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Saylor.

My other council members asked a lot of the questions I did have, but one question, I'm not sure if you covered it in your presentation. As the downtown grows and more of the residential turns into commercial or let's say depending on how the assessment is set up maybe there's more square footage brought into a particular development that is new to the city and therefore they would be maybe assessed a little bit of a higher fee depending how we set it up I guess my question would be given the dynamics that could change over time does that is that the primary way in which the budget would change and grow I'm just imagining, let's say if the bid is bringing in 100,000 dollars today and then in 5 years. You know, a handful of new people have come in and now it's 150,000. I guess I'm just trying to understand, you know, let's say if it's set up and then union 93 fully comes on board and then suddenly there's a big commercial property and the bid. Are we just going to add more revenue to the BID to do more when more people come on? Or is there any way where it says, hey, this is kind of our budget. We'll reduce your assessment every year based on any new ones that come in. I'm just kind of curious if it's a flexible.

And maybe add in tier two maybe needs to become tier one because they are now doing more things in that area. How do you maneuver within that?

Everything.

How do you evolve? How do you change? How do you grow it? How do you shrink it?

Yeah. And the one way you make those adjustments to boundaries, for example, or to rates or to even uses is you come back to the city council through the ordinance process and you adopt that. So whatever gets adopted in the ordinance, once the petition comes in and they say, Hey, this is our petition. Everyone likes it. You guys adopt the ordinance. That's what you live with until you change the ordinance. But The ordinance can be changed in the future as demonstrated by the City of Nampa. In 2024, I think pre-2024, they were at that flat rate. I discussed $200 or $300. It wasn't working. They came back with a different formula, which is a percentage of the assessed valuation. And if you read through their ordinance now, they're phasing it in over time. They're starting at one rate, and each year the rate goes up a little bit more, goes up a little bit more until it matches with what the city of Caldwell has. which the city of Caldwell, their tier one is the .033, and their tier two is .0025. So that's what NAMP is trying to match. But prior to that, it was just flat rate. But they had to do it through ordinance. And, you know, I guess there's a risk that in the future, who's to say if an ordinance could get passed. I would assume if it was reasonable, it would have a good chance of doing that if it had the property owner support. And that's one of the things that we, again, heard time and time again, work with the property owners, work with the property owners. We know you're going to have businesses with tenants and they're going to want to Be involved, but where the real power is is to work with the ownership of the parcels and then something else that is interesting what what city of Boise does. is they have association memberships because their downtown has grown over the years and it's popular and more people want to be in their downtown, but they're not in the district. And they go, well, how do we get involved? How do we get a seat on the board? How do we do this? Well, you can become an associate member and pay a fee which goes into the bucket, but you don't have the same rights as someone within the district. So that's another thing that you can set this up to get, not just your normal BID special assessment, but set it up so people can donate, so people can give association fees, sponsorships, and those types of other creative revenue sources. And then one final point, I think if you do a percentage of assessed valuation, you kind of cover the growth as assessed valuation grows, people's assessed valuation grows, so would the revenues back to the BID, assuming you didn't have a recession where all the assessed valuations dropped. which would, I just think, happen mechanically as you did the calculation, if that were to occur.

Mr. Mayor?

Councilman Schroeder.

I think one thing that would be very helpful would be like an example budget. Just to see like, you know, all hypothetical, right? But like what does a, you know, 0.001 or 0.0025... be unassessed value, what would that bring people? I think that would be part of this. I think that would be really illustrative and it could help people kind of decide what they think about it. I agree. It should really be driven by the businesses that want this. And I think that's really important. So maybe if you're listening to them and talking with them, you guys have an idea, would you take a stab at that kind of producing those sorts of materials for them?

Yeah, we could do something like that. I think we're When I visited with legal on this, they said, you know, support stuff's okay, but city shouldn't be out going, hey, here's what we're doing. Can you sign a petition type thing? So I think there's just a practical expectation that for the maps and the calculations and the budgets and things, that's where we can act as a support role. And For example, if we hold these town halls, we can get a lot more feedback with people in a group than we did. I think individual was helpful as a starting point, but I think it's important for us to get 50 people in a room and hear them all out and really see if they really have the wherewithal to want to get into the petition stage and really take this across the finish line. I think there's three or four larger property owners that have indicated an interest in being the champion. And if they're willing to do that, I think they've got a good shot at, you know, persuading people that might be on the fence but without really having business and business owners and property owners both i think it's important to be both um you know if they're not willing to advocate for it i don't think it'll ever get back to the city council thanks mr mayor that's my taylor yeah just maybe a comment kind of concluding some thoughts here i think the idea has a lot of merit

And I appreciate your context about how sort of this conversation sort of has its roots in what's gonna sort of replace the downtown urban renewal district. Because there are a lot of requests to MDC about the concerts and paying for things that, frankly, I've always found to be a little bit off topic or off, really not aligned with what the urban renewal district should be doing. But I understand why there's that desire. So I think there's value in that because having something downtown to kind of help people coalesce around something and be organized, I think there's merit to that. And I would much rather be a BID than a URD. I think that's very appropriate. But what you're also describing in some ways is very much what sounds like a downtown business association, a membership-driven, let's promote ourselves, let's bring things down here for our own benefit, right? But then we're layering on just a little bit of enforcement or perpetuity of government action. So to me, I think there's a lot of value and I want to get into it, but it's going to be really important that the way we sort of set it up feels like we're not stepping into the role of a nonprofit business association that should be promoting itself for its own benefit. We have to really, in my mind, we have to establish why a BID, why the city council, why the city should take this step and why that's important. So a lot of value in the discussion where it's going. I think we should do it and bring a lot of people in. But when we get down to nailing down the specifics, to me, that's going to be really important to make sure that we're not stepping over to a place where the private sector should be coordinating and organizing itself. And I know there's been stops and starts in downtown Meridian on this. I know that's... The history here too. So maybe that's part of the conversation. But to me, I think that's just kind of really important that we sort of figure out the nuances. Because to me, I'm a little bit, there's a lot of questions I have about the actual application of doing this and how we set it up. That's going to be really important. But I do think it's valuable. that an entity like this could do a lot of good, especially if the business owners are opting in, the majority of them, saying this is something that would be really important to us. But hopefully that, to me, I just hear private sector membership organization that could exist, and then we're just adding a little bit more to it that I want to make sure that it's appropriate. But I appreciate it. This has been very helpful. Thank you.

Councilman Taylor, a lot of communities. I looked at Missoula's, for example. You know, they have a DBA, they have a BID, they have a URD. I mean, they've got like five-legged redevelopment stool. Not to say you need five legs, but it seems like a lot of communities are using a lot of different tools to get across the goal line. And when you talk to people familiar with those communities, there's all sorts of store backstories and politics and that group doesn't like that group. And so you got to be cautious about having too many variables in the equation. But point well taken, I think in a perfect world, A downtown business association, they could go have a meeting in a thing and say, hey, our fees are going to be $1,000 a year. We'll pool the money, and we'll go hold a concert. That's in a perfect world. You know how that works. Three out of the 10 agree to pay the $1,000, and the others don't, and then everybody's mad at each other. So that's where I think BIDs are probably a helpful tool.

What I've tried to equate it to in my head, we're really talking, this is like center cow, far downtown. You know, the businesses that go into the village, they pay a premium. They have everything taken care of for them. They have events that are put on as a value benefit to everyone. And everyone pays that in their rents. You know, that's kind of how they're set up. And I think the same can be said even for other shopping centers that, you know, provide joint services to the entire area, whether it's sidewalk cleaning or other types of things. And unfortunately, in your downtown where you traditionally have individual businesses property owners of so it's it's hard to replicate those type of activities efficiently um and you and yeah but that's kind of how i've tried to like in my head articulate you know you're kind of creating that and while the chamber makes a lot of sense what the chamber does not do for all their as a membership driven by people opting in they are not out there taking care of sidewalks for for their businesses. And so it has some similarities and it has some differences. And, and ultimately though, it's what the businesses want and are willing to pay for it. Cause it doesn't, you know, they can, they can triple that money if they want people to take care of everything for them, you know, but it's really, what do they think that they have time for or don't have time for as a value benefit to it. So it's a great conversation. Yeah. Ultimately.

Well, thank you for the comments. I'll note those down, and I'll certainly report back to the stakeholders that we've had this meeting and see if they want to get together for some sort of a town hall to bounce off ideas on boundaries and things. Again, it's their process. If they can make it happen, they can come back with a petition. Thank you. Thanks, Curtis. Yep.

Okay, next item up, executive session. Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Robertson. I move that we move into executive session per Idaho Code section 74-206, subsection 1C, and subsection 1D, and 74-206A, subsection 1A.

A promotion a second to go an executive session is their discussion. If not, call the roll. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Kavanaugh. Taylor. Strater. Woodlock. Little Roberts.

Overton. Aye. Aye.

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Aye

Council, do I have a motion? Mr. Mayor, I move that we come out of executive session. I have a motion and a second to come out of executive session. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, nay. The ayes have it. We are out of executive session.

Mr. Mayor, I move that we adjourn our city council work session.

Second.

Motion and a second to adjourn the work session. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, nay. The ayes have it. We are adjourned. Council will come call this meeting order for the record. It is May 19, 2026 at 6.02 p.m. We'll begin tonight's Record State Council meeting with roll call attendance.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Councilman Kavanaugh, Councilman Taylor, Councilwoman Strader, Councilman Whitlock, Councilwoman Little-Roberts, Councilman Overton, Mayor Simison.

Here. Next time up is the Pledge of Allegiance. If you'd all please rise and join us in the pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I do not see Pastor Hankey with us this evening, so we will move on past the community invocation and go to adoption of the agenda.

Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Overton.

On tonight's agenda we will be vacating the executive session at the end and with that only change I move that we adopt the agenda.

I have a motion a second to adopt the agenda with the amendment of removing the executive session is any discussion. If not on favor signify by saying aye aye those name guys have it and the agenda is adopted with the change counseling and announcements and recognition. With that, then we will move on to public forum. Mr. Cork, anyone sign up under public forum?

Mr. Mann, nobody signed up.

Nobody did? Okay. Then with that, we'll move on to our public hearings. First item up is a public hearing for Syringa Crossing Mixed Use Development, H. 2025-0007. We will open this public hearing with staff comments.

Mr Mayor, members of the Council, so the applicant is requesting continuance on Syringa Crossing to June 16th to work with city staff to adjust their plan and address the Planning and Zoning Commission's comments.

Okay, is the applicant here or Council have any questions for staff? Is the applicant here, do they have any comments they'd like to make? I do see we have Mr Mansfield online.

Good evening, Council. I don't really have any comments. We're just working with staff and we're working with our consultants to address some of the concerns of the Planning and Zoning Commission. Before we take this in front of you, we want to bring you a nice project. So we're requesting deferral to June 16th.

Okay. Council, any questions for the applicant? Okay. So everything was noticed properly. There were no issues. This is just a request to continue on this item. Did we have anyone who has showed up tonight to speak on this item? Okay. I'm seeing no one that has identified themselves as speaking on this. Council, what's your pleasure? Mr. Mayor.

Councilman Overton. Per the applicant's request, I move that we continue on The syringa crossing mixed use development H 2025 dash 0007 until June 16th of 2026.

I have a motion a second to continue this item is there any discussion. If not on favor signify by saying aye aye those name you guys have it and the public hearing is continued. All right. With that, we'll move on to item two this evening, which is public hearing continued from April 28th, 2026 for Rolling Hills, age 2025-0040. We will continue this public hearing with comments from staff.

Mayor, members of the council. So yes, this application was continued. Rolling Hill project was continued from April 28th till now. And the city council continued that project for staff to create a development agreement provisions for approval, get revised landscape plans, elevations, unit count, commercial square footage, and coordinate with the adjacent neighborhood and developer regarding the sale of future properties in the area. So I did want to highlight just staff did have a meeting with an adjacent developer. I did send you guys an email kind of updating that. Don't want to highlight it too much because it's not part of this application, but there are seven properties to the north of each view circle that are under LOI or letter of intent. He is still having conversations with three other of the properties for that. And as you can see, the ones up here and two are kind of in this corner that are directly above this. And those conversations are ongoing. And I'll kind of leave it at that. As far as, so staff did receive all the revised drawings and updated landscape plan. We did get the irrigation issue as far as trees resolved, and they're actually gonna be providing them on the south side of the pathway instead of on the north side, so it won't be in the irrigation district's easement. So we did resolve, the issue with the trees in the irrigation district's easement. They did provide the updated elevations for you guys to look at. So as we discussed at the previous hearing, they did have a transition to the north that was like three stories onto the interior and two stories to the north. And they did revise that to show three stories on both sides. And that did raise the unit count from 184 units to 200 units. So it was an increase of 16 units and about 9% throughout the project. That did also increase the square footage for the non-residential space or commercial space to 19,517 square feet of non-residential space. And the open space calculations did decrease a little bit to 45,000 square feet instead of 53,000. But generally, it is all still what you guys saw. It's still the same concept plan. And those are just the changes that were made from the previous hearing, your guys' request. And I will stand for any questions that you have.

Thank you, Nick. Council, any questions for staff? Okay. Would the applicant like to come forward with any comments?

Good evening, I'm Brett Slagle. My address is 2409 North Sepulveda Boulevard in Manhattan Beach, California, 90266. I saw you guys three weeks ago. Thanks so much for allowing us to come back. Our presentation is very short and really just on quick repeat. So I'll just blaze through it really quick. We moved to 200 units. We raised the building to three stories on the one side, and we raised the commercial non-residential square footage. Site adjustments, we made some minor footprint adjustments to the Northern buildings. We made minor amenity location adjustments, but we maintained all the existing amenities that you previously saw. uh as nick pointed out we just uh we also adjusted the landscape landscaping on the north side of the building to accommodate this row of trees per the development agreement the northern neighborhood this information is somewhat different and we're kind of getting this a little bit on hearsay but we understand that maybe now there's nine So the ones kind of in the corner there, maybe those people are now under LOI. We're not entirely sure. We're not running that process. But anyways, it's our belief after speaking with kind of their informal representative that, yes, in fact, all of these properties, except for the Currently, the one in the red is the one that is a holdout at this point, but they're trying and deliberating with them right now. But it does really seem factual that these people are interested in selling. And then the second point here is that Nick and his team have met with this developer as well. So that's second time you've heard that information. development agreement. This is just for us to simply say that Nick and community development, we've been going back and forth into development agreement. We are in agreement with it. And so here it is, but we're ready to accept all of these points today. public comment. I just want to make a quick point that a lot of the advocates for the project that were here three weeks ago are here again. I've asked them to not speak again unless they specifically want to, but I didn't feel like that was probably a great use of any of our time. And so by all means, they can speak again if you'd like them to, but I'm probably trying to keep it moving. I know you have to open it up for public comment, but just know that they're here if that's necessary. And that's all that I have today. And I will stand for any questions.

Thank you. Council, any questions? Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Mr. Clark, do we have anyone that signed up to testify?

Mr. Mayor, the only people that wrote down their name did not mark that they wanted to speak.

OK, well, we'll leave it up to you if you would like to come forward and testify. We just ask that you limit your comments to the changes that we have seen or the development agreement just that way we can keep it focused. So if anyone would like to come forward and if you're online, you can use the raise your hand feature if you'd like to provide any comments. John Potter, See no one coming forward and no one online raising their hand, because you have to wave any comments. John Potter, up to waves. John Potter, Council your direction.

Mister mayor. Council members and the quick question for staff before I make the next. As we sit here tonight development agreement has been drawn up the applicant says they're in complete agreement with that are there any other outstanding issues that we need to know about this application.

Mr. Mayor, Council President Overton, no, there is not. You know, as far as it would be the development agreement provisions in front of you and updated unit count, updated commercial square footage, as long as all of those are things that council understands is in agreement with, there's no other outstanding issues. That's correct.

Thank you. Mr. Mayor. Councilman Overton. I move that we close the public hearing on item 2, Rolling Hill, H2025-0040. Second.

I have a motion and a second to close the public hearing. Is there a discussion? If not, all in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed, nay. Yes, 7, the public hearing is closed.

Mr. Mayor, if there's no other comment, move forward and recommend after considering all staff, applicant, and public testimony, I move that we approve file number H2025-0040 as presented in the staff report for the hearing date of May 19, 2026.

HAVE A MOTION AND A SECOND TO APPROVE ITEM 2, WHICH IS H2025-0040. IS THERE A DISCUSSION?

SURE.

COUNCILMAN KABANER.

QUICK, APPRECIATE STAFF WORKING WITH THE APPLICANT ON THIS, AND I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD USE OF A CONTINUANCE. I HAVE A GENERAL RULE WHERE I SPEAK AND LET THE APPLICANT KNOW WHERE I'M NOT GOING TO BE SPEAKING IN FAVOR. I recognize for many people in the audience, this is the right solution. I view this as exacerbating and already challenging problem in the area. So I won't be voting in favor. We've got a good sense where the council is going to land tonight. Wish you well on your project, but it's just not a request before the council. I can be in support of this evening.

Mr. Mayor.

Yeah.

I just wanted to make a quick comment. This has been a really tough neighborhood to try to figure out. And I just really appreciated the continuance and the, Tanya Kessler- staff and the applicants follow up here, I thought it was really helpful and. Tanya Kessler- I feel like it really established that this is a neighborhood that is in transition, I know, not every single property is in transition, but we can't make decisions based on that one marginal property, I think the. whole neighborhood feels like it's in transition. It feels like it's ready for its next phase. And I think that's exciting. It's listen, it's always sad when a kind of a piece of our more rural historical piece of our city leaves, but we're moving on to something new. That's hard, but at the same time, it's exciting and it feels like a great project. And I think hopefully the continuance gave the applicant an opportunity as well. So I think this was a win for everybody and I'll be in support.

Thank you. Council, any additional comments?

If not, clerk, call the roll. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Kavanaugh?

No.

Taylor? Strater?

Aye.

Whitlock?

Aye.

Little-Roberts?

Aye.

Overton? Aye.

Five ayes, one nay, and the item is agreed to. And I want to extend my appreciation to you, Nick, for helping get this through quickly. From that was much appreciated. Okay. Executive session was vacated, so council, anything under future meeting topics? Or a motion to adjourn? Mr. Mayor. Councilman Overton.

I move that we adjourn.

Motion to second and adjourn. All in favor signify by saying aye.