City searches for way to preserve spirit of CRA

With the Sarasota downtown community redevelopment area set to expire next year, city officials hope they can establish an effective economic development funding mechanism in its place — perhaps one heavily modeled after the CRA.

At a special meeting Thursday to discuss life “beyond the CRA,” the City Commission agreed to explore various avenues for funding capital projects in areas the city wants to see improved. In addition to compiling a list of future projects to see if the county could work collaboratively on any of them, the commission was focused on seeing what the city could do on its own.

City Manager Tom Barwin said staff was investigating the possibility of maintaining the city’s contribution to the downtown CRA — the tax-increment financing (TIF) revenue from within the current downtown CRA boundaries. The city is expected to contribute $4.3 million in tax revenue to the CRA in its final year.

Currently, net revenues from the downtown CRA will be split 50/50 between the downtown CRA and the Newtown CRA. The Newtown CRA, though still in place, currently generates no TIF money of its own because property values declined following its inception in 2007.

Because of the city’s interest in encouraging development in Newtown, Barwin said staff would see whether the 50/50 split might need to change. Either way, however, the board was interested in keeping some sort of capital improvement fund alive.

“If the county isn’t going to participate, we would still have an economic development tool in place,” Barwin said. “The resources could still be shared along the lines of the current policy.”

City Attorney Robert Fournier said that, though the city does not have the power to modify or extend the downtown CRA on its own, it still has the ability to donate money to the existing redevelopment trust fund. Therefore, the city could simply elect to allocate a certain amount of property tax revenue for the same purpose it had been allocated for under the CRA.

“Whether you want to do that is up to you,” Fournier said. “I don’t think that’s anything the county would necessarily have approval authority over.”

Although the commission was focused on options other than a new or extended CRA, Mayor Willie Shaw made clear that the city was still interested in engaging the county on a discussion regarding a new CRA with different boundaries. County Commissioner Paul Caragiulo said he’d potentially be interested in creating a new city CRA that targeted remaining areas with slum and blight conditions.

“I don’t want to dare let that go,” Shaw said. “That’s an open conversation at this point.”