Webinar: https://connectdot.connectsolutions.com/pjj6g9jkudgd/
Please standby for realtime captions.
Ladies and gentleman. Thank you for standing by. The conference will begin shortly.
Ladies and gentleman, thank you for standing by. The conference will begin shortly.
Ladies and gentleman. Thank you for standing by. The conference will begin shortly.
Ladies and gentleman, thanks for standing by. The conference will begin shortly.
Ladies and gentleman, thank you for standing by. The conference will begin shortly.
Ladies and gentleman. Thanks for standing by. Welcome to the U.S. Department of transportation Value Capture strategies : Capitalizing on the Value Created by Transportation conference call. At this time all participants are in listen only mode. We will conduct a question and answer question session. Instructions will be given at that time. If you require assistance during the called please press star then zero. I would like to turn the conference over to your hosts, Charity Coleman. Please, go ahead.
Thank you. On behalf of the Federal Highway Administration I would like to welcome everyone to today's virtual peer exchange on value capture : Capitalizing on the Value Created by Transportation my name is Charity Coleman and I'm with the U.S. Department of transportation and I will be assisting with any technical issues have. We had a have a set of great presenters today and you can see from there they will be presenting on various aspects of value capture. We will introduce you in detail shortly. I want to show you around the room. On the top left-hand side of your screen you will find the audio call in information. In the lower left-hand corner is a chat box that you can use to submit questions to the presenters during the webinar. You can also ask questions by pressing star then one on the trout telephone. You can receive more instructions on that later. If you have technical difficulty with Adobe connect or AT&T, please use the chat pod and send a private message to be and you can start a private conversation and will try to help you with those issues. Our webinar is expected to run until 3 PM today. We will field questions for the presenters at the end of each presentation. We will also have time at the end of the webinar for additional Q&A. The speakers presentation slides will be available for download at the end of the webinar. The slides and recording up today's event will also be presented -- posted on the FHWA website. If you're interested in applying for professional development hours or credits for your participation in today's webinar, we will provide information at the end of the webinar on how to obtain confirmation of your participation.
Before we begin today, we would like you to answer some pole questions. Most of you have started to answer these pole questions and those who haven't, we will give you a moment or two to simply respond to the pole questions.
I want to thank you for taking time to respond to the pole questions. It will help us understand your -- your level of knowledge with tax increment financing and specific knowledge on the topics.
Okay we also have a second set of pole questions that you can take another moment or two to reply to these questions. That would be helpful.
The question is, have you considered using tax increment finance or a similar technique for a transportation project? What is your experience with tax increment finance? And we will give you another moment or two to respond to that.
[ Poll being conducted ]
while you are responding I would like to introduce our moderator, Mr. Sasha Page, a principal at IMG rebel, based in Washington, DC with over two decades experience on advising infrastructure finance projects developments and public/private partnerships with transportation and other infrastructure. He is focused on value capture tools can find new and existing infrastructure with the federal highway EDC five program and public agencies in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Miami and Baltimore. Before you introduce our first speaker, do you have any reaction to our pole questions?
Thank you, charity. I think the pole results show we have a diverse group of federal, state, local and other officials. I appreciate that. It also shows there is a general understanding about tax finance but folks are learning to looking to learn more or perhaps may -- tips in the future and some of them, it looks like around 50% have actually implemented once and we are looking forward to hearing if they have comments.
Most folks are focus on highways but there is understanding of a desire to learn about transit and other TIF related tools and projects. Thanks a lot. We will start now with the first speaker. I will introduce him. Donny Hamilton is the director of finance and administration for Federal Highway Administration's Texas division office where he oversees financial administrative services for implement in the technical -- for doing federal-aid rent programs. He has extensive experience with Value Capture techniques and financing with past experiences as a -- program portfolio manager down at U.S. D.O.T. He has a tenure portfolio including oversight of 10 year ground breaking projects, Union Station and the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco. Donnie, I will turn it over to you.
Thank you, Sasha. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Great, great. Good morning to those who are far out West and good afternoon to those in the East Coast and Central time zones. Welcome to today's session. I want to put a disclaimer out there, if you hear a rambunctious two and 5-year-old in the background, I have tried to stay in the closet to deliver today's presentation so please forgive me if you hear knocks on the door and people saying," daddy." I just want to put that disclaimer out there. Today I'm happy to be talking to you up about value capture and our presentation online with consist of what is every day counts. We talk about value capture these are included. Why is Value Capture needed? To give you overview and benefits, cover the tax increment financing that we are going to look at today and we will try to answer a few questions if you have any. So you say what is this every day counts? This is an ability to for the state to select what are there some of their unique needs specifically by the bullets, a state-based model to identify and rapidly deploy proven but underutilized innovations. What we are trying to say is the innovation lies with you all out there, the people on the line. What this does is helps us to promote to help shorten the project delivery process, and Hans Romer safety, reduce congestion and all of the great things but I also want to note that Congress recognized this is really important, so in important that it was included in the fast-track we are currently operating under. The innovations that are typically selected by the stakeholders so it is done in conjunction with multiple parties so you have to take into consideration market readiness. These projects and innovations are ready to go so if you have things on your shelves that may be ready to go we really want you guys to look to initiatives such as these like every day counts and work with us to see, can we make, progress these initiatives. They are usually on two year cycles. This particular aspect is within the fifth realm and there were 10 innovations here. Why is it needed? Why do I need this? It has to do with capacity. Conditions and safety. On the first slide you see that over 40% of every five miles of our interstates are congested. That contributes to $160 billion in wasted time and fuel. The last time I had an opportunity to speak to a group like this, I told you guys about a truck that I renamed which is now called sentiment and it is a gas guzzler. To bring it into practical terms, it was a whole lot of gas sitting on I-35 in Austin. This comes close to home. The trunk actually, sentiment, died the other day so I'm still grieving a bit but it wasted a lot of fuel on I-35 so when it comes to capacity and saving money, that is what matters to me.
20% out of every adults five miles are related to poor pavement condition so 20% of our roads are bad and there are 836 backlogs related to that. The highway fatalities as well as pedestrian deaths, we need those types of innovations for people like you to help save lives. That is a priority of our U.S. D.O.T., federal highways and we need your thoughts and ideas to help make that happen.
This is a very important slide. When you look at the highway trust fund, many people on the call know that we are in a state where it is somewhat unsustainable. You see the outlays for people who are not the day-to-day finances. These are expenses that are coming in and they are continuously growing because pavements are bad. People want to make new improvements. We have to fix these roads. People want new highways. The costs add up. The revenues coming in as related to maybe people are not driving as much so you're not collecting as many taxes on fuel and so forth. The revenue and interest on that is really not increasing with the outward outlays. The CBO which is the congressional budget office for fiscal year 21 to fiscal year 26, there is a gap between dedicated revenue and spending that will average $19 billion. Think of this. We are almost close to October 1. Even though we have a new five-year authorization, the beginning of fiscal year 21, that will face a projected gap between revenues and outlays of roughly $94 billion over five years. I want you guys to really think about that in terms of how we are living with the highway trust fund. What does that mean to you? It is critical for our state and local governments and economic development corporations and so forth to come up and think through multiple revenue-generating strategies that are going to help to advance mobility strategies. We really need you guys and your ideas and innovations that you can bring to the table. So here is a quick overview of how value capture works. This is the toolbox of strategies used by public agencies to share that portion of increased property value. Here is how it works. You have your beautiful government building there in the corner. The government invests in transportation infrastructure and services, your roads and etc. and if it is close to in a nearby vicinity it increases your property value and you say who's property value does it increase? If you are a retail business, a homeowner, you own a nice condo or something, it is going to increase your property value. If your home is near Austin or anywhere within the central business district, 10 miles around that, you are making some money and that goes into the property on this pocket as a process. Say that profit was $10, based on what you paid to the government, Singer had $10, the taxes that would be paid, the fraction maybe seven dollars where what you are benefiting off in terms of profits from being located there, that might be three dollars and that goes back into the government for more reinvestment. So that is how that works. The importance of value capture, the supplements traditional revenue sources essentially. Some of the beneficiaries of our transportation infrastructure contribute to the costs. That is a really great thing. They target the beneficiaries. Not everybody. It is a great source as a match or as a pledge to our federal and state grant dollars. Private developers love these types of projects, attracting private capital and so forth. As Sasha said, San Francisco, L.A., Denver and a lot of cool places and a lot of these places that implement strategies such as these really benefited economically in terms of economic development. People wanted to move and visit there and when you see profits, developers come because they want to take advantage of some of those profits. It helps the enhanced speed and project delivery process. We have roads and bridges, the transit improvements, complete streets, bicycle and pedestrian and so forth and I would like to highlight we have Raymond here from El Paso RMA. We have Duane on here from the beltline, Dallas from Lincoln and every single one of these improvement types and so forth in the rest of these presentations hit on every single one of these targets, these bullet items so I hope you are taking notes because it is going to be some good stuff coming your way. I really have to give a compliment to you, Raymond. I'm sorry, this is an awful bit but I am excited to hear Raymond tell us because he is a mad scientist for finance development strategies and increment financing. I got to visit El Paso a year or two ago and I loved the panda express. He helped facilitate. I love to eat at this place that popped up as a result of how they invested in the system and then panda express came and I love to go there and I love their orange chicken so I go there every time I go to El Paso so thank you, Raymond. I really owe a special thank you to you because that economic development, if it had not spurred I would not get to enjoy panda express every time I come to El Paso.
As we look at the value capture techniques summary there are a myriad of things you use. You have developer contributions, special assessments, fees, joint developments, concessions, naming and advertisement rights but today we are going to focus on the increment financing and this is really allocating back to infrastructure from some portion of increased property tax which we cover early that fosters new development.
So with the tax increment finance, I like to talk about aliases and when I think about aliases, it's kind of another name so here are other entities known as. When I think of the goat, Bo Jackson, premier NFL teams, like the Las Vegas Raiders, the Raiders are the best team in the NFL. And even like Seymour and couch. When I hear that I know my wife has done something wrong because she says, Seymour, you are on the couch so I know she's talking me and I know I won't get to sleep sleep in my bed that night because I said something off that I should not have said and I have to -- so when it comes to tax increment financing, it is sort of the same thing. You are going to hear that in finance. California it is the redevelopment agency, Georgia, tax allocation district. New Jersey, revenue allocation district. These all mean the same thing. I know Pennsylvania is represented on the call today, the transportation revitalization but we have Georgia specifically on here today and Dwayne is going to talk about the TADs and Raymond will talk about the TIRZ. Don't get locked into exactly what it means everywhere you go. It has various aliases or names. When you look at this slide I did show how TIF actually works. When you look at the orange tire triangle it represents incremental revenue allocated to the TIF district. The blue represents the baseline so when they are combined you see and the lighter blue section to the right, what has been generated for both of these when I showed you the slide on how value capture works and it goes back to the government based on the revenue generated and we said we had $10, seven will go here and three will go there, let's look at the blue part as the tax base. You will have to, that is frozen and that will go back to the government anyway. The extra that is generated in terms of incremental over and above that Orange Park, that is the part people benefit off and that is the part that you get profit off and that is the part that goes back to the government to help reinvest in these areas that you may love to go and visit. Test double test GIFs usually range from 25 to 30 years. This gives you a good model of what, how a TIF works. Some of the benefits here, are clear.
You can see job creation and I'm excited to hear Dwayne talk about that with the Atlanta beltline. Local tax base protections, the political appeal . People may not think about that. You don't actually have to go out for a referendum or vote in order to increase taxes because they are the way to use -- tax increment financing where you can generate additional revenues without having to go out and upset voters sometimes like me that they would not want to pay extra funding for things especially if I don't feel like I benefit but at the same time, it works for our political field because you could set a space where people could go in and you could generate extra money based on incremental, without having to assess additional taxes. That's a really great thing. It helps revitalize blighted areas. You may see subsidies there with areas that need to be revitalize. The maybe subsidies taxes generating to create tax increment financing districts.
Here are some of the financing tools you can use. Pay-go financing. Essentially you wait for the incremental revenue to become available. Developer finance, you use the incremental value to reimburse developers for TIF costs that may be eligible. With municipal financing you have to actually look at is there enough revenue being generated to tax these bonds with these things. There are cities that generate quite a bit of incremental revenue where they can do that and lastly the municipal financing with developer participation. Here is with a local issues bonds with the developer simultaneously pledging to purchase all or a significant portion of bonds and they pay by the into agreement increment generated by the TIF.
Who can form a TIF district? Here they are. I don't want you to sleep on this economic development authorities and I am going to call out Raymond again here. There is a lot going on in West Texas near El Paso regarding how they work with economic development corporations to come up with really good strategies on how they can reinvest in the infrastructure based off increments generated. You want to get those economic development corporations and authorities involved as well as multiple partners so you can work together to be able to strong -- network and economy frankly. Here are some of the ways you can use them.
Here is a slide that tells us about our role that focuses on land-use and land ownership. In the green dot, it is a itty-bitty piece and we may have direct interest because you may have a grant or loan or something like that tied to it but as you can see, in the big circle, the majority of the land owned and regulated policies happen at the local level which is why, again, we need you guys, we need your buy-in to understand where the benefits are so that you can, decision-makers, where you are buying into these things because they work. In the darker blue is where state level is involved but you can see your federal and state level are minimal level we need you guys to help advance things.
The value capture implementation team, these are focused areas. We are communicating today to share those tools to help our own staff for more value capture to everyone on this call because we want to share those ideas and practices that are working and we want to connect you to them to take advantage of those. The technical assistance we have great people here, Dwayne, Dallas, Raymond, Sasha. We could bring those people together so we could give you technical assistance and here is the clearinghouse again of best practices that I spoke about a little bit earlier. That concludes everything I have to talk about. Thank God my toddler did not come through today to bother me but that is all I half. You have any questions we could try to take a few seconds to address them.
Thank you, Donny. That is great. Are there questions for Donny? You can ask a question, press *1 on your phone or use the chat box.
Okay. Why don't I go ahead and introduce Raymond Telles and if you have questions we will answer those. There is a question. Let me ask this one question. This is from Lawrence Hall. That was a lot on benefits but I'm curious about costs. I've read many tips -- TIFs don't generate enough revenue. Is that something you want to address, Donny or do we want to have other folks also address that?
I could address it but I think we have an expert on here who has Expo sees even broader than mine. Is exactly right. I will ask if Thay Bishop could jump in here. She told me increments could make up a certain percentage of a project that you could use for pledging or reinvesting in a certain transportation facility or an asset but usually, if a TIFs of the increments cannot generate enough revenue it as a backing in another area for another form of revenue that helps to be combined with it to deliver what you need to deliver but I will also ask Thay Bishop because I learned a lot from her and she is on the value of capture implementation team. Are you available to speak to this, Thay Bishop?
I think you just addressed the question, Donny. You know, for every single tax incremental finance victory there would be a sponsor and either the TIF District or project specific TIF can be the city or the county and a typically depend on the size of the TIF. In many cases, the TIF might suffers the economy downturn, then typically the city or county, or the project sponsor is going to back up the TIF so that is why it is very important for all of the TIFs need to be considered to do the BUT FOR -- analysis -- forecast of the potential economic benefits and certainly, when it is using the tax incremental revenue for bond issuance and typically you would not issue 100% of the revenue forecast. You are only using a certain percentage of that and taking into consideration the economy and the economic cycle to minimize the risk.
[ Indiscernible - multiple speakers ] Municipality should always consider whether TIF as financing tool, including the existence of blight, project economy needs to be rejuvenated
This is --
-- [ Indiscernible - multiple speakers ]
The other speaker.
I think we will probably have some examples of that in the presentation. Another related cause for TIFs which I'm not sure will be covered is that when TIFs are used to purchase bonds and there are all these related costs associated with bond purchases including attorneys in underwriting, those can be pretty substantial. There is no way around that in terms of new governmental loans for instance infrastructure bank providing funding so you have to pay back a TIF excuse me a TIF is structured the payback an infrastructure loan so there are associated costs and maybe one more answer from some of our presenters?
Thank you. Let me ask one more question. This is from Shannon double is planning commissions or MPO's create a TIF or a region? This is -- Doug, do you want to answer that or others on the call? Again, I think the answer is going to be specific to the state and whether the double is what the authorities of the MPO are. I think mostly again if bonding is involved, I'm not sure that MPOs or NPP's can do that so I think that TIFs are generally through other units of government.
Yeah, I think that typically they are created by a city or county and then they have doubled as create a TIF district to fix a project, to -- for the TIF.
That's right. This is Sasha page again. There are examples were counties have created TIFs throughout the county but not for the entire county.
I think that --
[ Indiscernible - multiple speakers ]
Moving on here.
Go ahead.
It is a formality. I'm sorry but the kids I mentioned just got back home so I got diverted there a bit but also, in regards to the last question, I have seen where some types of finance districts, the locals actually tool or propose an expansion of that area or district to pull in other areas so they could produce higher increments or revenues to reinvest into a system that benefits them actually both and regarding planning, and planning commissions, I used to work in planning as well. These are the things we are working with planners right now in federal highways or other places to think about the strategies up front and how they can come up with those barriers, finding strategies before you even move within the project development process to identify a revenue strategy to help advance certain mobility projects so we are starting up front with the planners. They are very important to the process because they can help forecast what the revenues look like in the future. Sorry about the, Sasha.
No problem. We have some other good questions but I will save them because I want to get a chance to make sure we have time for our other presenters and get back to these questions. I would like to introduce Raymond Telles, executive director of the -- real regional authority in El Paso Texas, a graduate of the University of Texas El Paso and -- University school of law and has served as the director of the -- since 2008. Before leaving the CRM a, Ray served as an assistant for the attorney of the city of El Paso and worked briefly for the El Paso Electric company. Ray? Please begin.
Thank you. Thank you all for having me. I really enjoy talking about what we are doing in El Paso because it is an interesting place and hopefully this PowerPoint will speak to that. Today we are going to talk about a transportation reinvestment zone that we have in El Paso. We have several of them but we will focusing on number two and this is kind of the layout of what I will be talking about. I want to start with a description of regional mobility authorities. It is an entity that is talked about in the state of Texas so I want to speak generally about what they are, what they can be and a little more into detail about our particular rent 21 here in El Paso and I think the best way to explain how TRZ works is to use it in context so I want to explain to you about a mobility plan we developed regionally, how the TRZ fits into that plan and specifically baked into the project that utilizes the proceeds generated from that particular TRZ and then we will wrap up with lessons learned on our use of the TRZ. We will start off within 21s in Texas. We are very unique entities. We are authorized by the state legislature. We are separate political subdivisions of the state wishes a fancy way of saying we are a separate governmental body. We are tasked solely with being involved in transportation projects. So when you think about water authorities, port authorities and all of that sort of thing, we are an authority that is focused on transportation. The good thing is that in our legislation, transportation project are broadly defined as you can see on the slide. They relate to toll, non-toll, rail, ferries, airports, hiking and bike paths. If it has something to do with mobility than an RMA in Texas can be involved in it so that's generally what RMAs in Texas do.
Our particular RMA is called the Camino real regional mobility authority. Armies are unfunded agencies. They are created by city Council and the city of El Paso in 2007 with the board of seven with a chair appointed by the governor and the rest are appointed by city Council. Our particular RMA has been pretty active since 2007. We have been involved in excess of $1 billion and I think we were rounding about 1 1/2 billion dollars the last time we talk. We will look at how the numbers are so large. The next point really is important because it alludes back to how RMAs are flexible and you can see some of the probably projects we have been involved in. We've been involved in toll roads, interstate interchanges, bridge tolling facilities, we actually constructed or put a historic streetcar back into service after a number of years, pedestrian/aesthetic improvements and bikeshare. A whole lot so multiple different types of projects we've been involved in. The last bullet is important because it highlights how flexible we are in terms of what we can do. We could be involved in any part of a project, the whole of it or just pieces. When you think about a project you think about planning, constructing, designing, financing, we can do that in pieces or collectively we can do the whole or really just fill the gaps of whatever is needed for the project. I should mention I am spending time on the RMA itself because I think it will help you understand how the mobility plan and specifically the project we are going to talk about that utilizes TRC -- TRZ revenues so you will understand how it all works together.
You can see the streetcar, but the before picture up top and when we shipped it off to be rehabilitated. You get an aesthetic project down below the streetcar where we beautified and created pedestrian amenities, one of our interstate interchanges and on the right-hand side you can see our bikeshare program which has been in operation for about five years. Again the point of this slide and a couple of the other ones before is that an RMA is a very flexible organization.
So this is really what we are going to talk about. I wanted to make sure you understood who we were before we jumped into a. We are going to talk about priority number two. To get there we need to understand the mobility. Back in 2008 we the city of Altair El Paso local MPO and developed -- $1 billion worth of projects in the region that we felt were priority projects that had not yet made it into our MPO plans we develop this mobility plan the prioritized that group of objects. To the plan, each of the agencies that were involved, the RNA and NPO agreed to take on different aspects of the plan and collectively bring those projects to fruition. One of the cities involved in the plan role in the plan was to create one or more -- transportation so the revenues generated through that value capture option and could be utilized for development and design and construction of projects within the plan so the city took on the job of creating the TRZ. And the RMA, we utilize the funds and construction constructed the products. We will talk about the interchange projects and how they all work.
Let's get into it. The CMP, 2008 CMP over $1 billion worth of regional priorities and you can see all then there. It did include all sorts of transit, toll, non-toll, aesthetic and pedestrian projects. Each plant partner to take on a different task within the project to get it done. I want to mention also that the militia movement one or more TRC's and in the end the implement to two separate TRC's. And the other part of that agreement was that once they created those Tran23s they would commit up to $70 million worth of transportation in the investment zone that generated revenue for the completion of these three particular projects. We will talk about the first one, the Americas interchange.
Let's talk a little bit about a TRZ. TRZ is as I alluded to earlier, just like a TIF. The distinction , ultimately, you are creating a zone in which you are going to capture the incremental increases in property or sales tax. These are some unique things about a TRZ. Project funded by a TRC must be located within that TRC which makes sense. You are going to create a zone so whatever incremental revenue you generate in that zone you want to be able to spend it within that zone. The TRC must be within the limits of the entity creating such zones. This touches on one of the questions posed earlier. Account he can create in certain districts, the county can create a zone but the zone must be within the jurisdiction of the county. The same goes for a municipality, the third bullet talks about the zone at least in Texas that must be contiguous so you cannot have any breaks in it and this is actually a really important point. If your jurisdiction breaks for any points and that zone is no longer contiguous, you will have issues requesting that zone. Incremental increases often attributed to new transportation that gives rise to the TRZ. If you are looking to implement a zone, normally what people do is create a zone over an area for which you are planning to put in a road -- that were way then by virtue of you constructing it, the property values on either side of the roadway inherently in the development of the roadway will increase in property value so that incremental increase is the reason you are creating the zone and normally you would use that projected in increment to pay for the roadway that you are delivering in the first place of that is generally speaking one of the uses for the TRZ.
It looks like we are getting a visitor. I apologize for that. I will keep checking. Let's talk a little bit about the difference between TIRZ which is a locally known name for a tax increment reinvestment zone. Transportation reinvestment zone is a little bit different so Tran24s are different from Tran23s in a couple of different ways. There are other the first you note is talking about how a TIRZ is a separate entity and requires the government to identify expenditures from that increment so a TIRZ has a governing board board that is appointed and dictates how TIRZ's are made. TRZ does not have a board so for example our TRZ was created by the city of El Paso and they determine how to use the revenues. Tran25s also have various planning and reporting requirements. In Texas you have to create a project and a financing plan B for your great the TIRZ. You don't have to do that with the TRZ but you should and reports from the governing board of the *1 five are required and are to be given to the Comptroller of the state of Texas as well as the entity that created the stone, the TIRZ, as well. The third bullet point talks about incremental revenues from a TRZ that can only be used for the development of transportation projects. That is a big difference between TIRZs as well. TIRZs's can be used for anything virtually within that zone so you can use it for utility work, for all sorts of thing. TRZ revenues can only be used for transportation projects.
Let's keep moving here. This is TRZ number two here in El Paso. It is enormous as you can see and there was some tweaks. This is an early map but I like it because it shows how large this is. It is just immense. Another reason I wanted to show this one is that you can see by way of example, the green section there shows you that section of the TRZ is going one quarter of a mile on either side of the centerline of the gateway and that section in green, but then you can see an orange which is connected to the green, 1/16 of a mile so you can change the width of your zone throughout the entire zone so that is I think why this map is particularly interesting.
This is how it works here in El Paso. And significant value capture in a nutshell using the El Pasoan TRZ . The city of El Paso in the base year, talking about the base year, is the way that you create the TRZ so in the base year the city of El Paso received $100 in property taxes on a parcel within the year and in the next year the year after the base year, the taxes were increased to $110. The $100 continues to go back to the city of El Paso but the incremental revenue of $10 goes into a separate TRZ fund and that is the increment we are talking about. That is what we are talking about in terms of the revenues off of the TRZ. Then in our case, the city of El Paso assigned those TRZ incremental revenues to the RMA and we used that pledge or that incremental fund, the TRZ fund, we used that to issued debt for the projects. This addresses a prior question as well about pay have in versus leveraging. We leverage the incremental revenue and use that to build a project today and we are paying it back over a period of time so that is how you get that here.
This is the project itself, going back to how the fund was actually used. The project itself costs $141 million. At the time, you'll remember the stimulus fund, we had ARRA and we pulled $16 million that was $96 million from that. And we had the tornado border at the time available and we took out a loan from the Texas infrastructure bank of $30 million to use for repayment and we borrowed $30 million from the SID. So we talked a little bit about that.
Another point I will mention is an important one. Another thing we did that I think was pretty valuable to us is that we created -- *1 Tate stimulus fund at the time and we were able to package this as a -- bond so we got additional subsidies paid. These are some of the loan terms. Let me finish that thought because it is important to -- the BAB subsidy we received forget 35% back on each interest payment this year so we agree with the city that the city and the RMA would split the subsidy so each would get half of the 35%. The city's portion is going back to pay down the debt quicker and the RMA's portion goes back to the RMA as unrestricted cash for use as operating funds and that is important for us because as I mentioned before, we are unfunded agency so this program helps fund our operations.
This is of course an important point. How did it do? Our projections, you will see our tax year on the left, projection in the center column and the actuals are doing quite well compared to our projections. After 10 tax years, we anticipated about $10.4 million in incremental revenue and in fact regenerated $23.8 million in actual revenues. Now a couple of really important points here. The actuals reflect a lot of major developments along the corridors, along the TRZ corridors which is really the point of the TRZ but we had pretty significant tax rate increases going from 63.3 up to 90.7 cents in this 10 year period and that alone accounts for $5.1 million of the 23.8 generated so that is an important point but overall, the point of the slightest assure you that we have actually done quite well in terms of projections versus performance.
The lessons learned as I would recommend as you are all looking at Tran23s, I would definitely include the financial team, the development of the TRZ so not just market advantage. If we would have rained in and a little bit, if we would have spent a little more time thinking out what the projections were really going to look like, and I should mention, too, that is important because it is a municipality in our case, if they create a loan like this the incremental loan has you tie down and you cannot use it for incremental so if you have -- [ Indiscernible muffled ] agreement -- counties but none of those incentive agreements can be used because you have already given away the tax incremental increase so that is an important point. You should engaged all the right consultants while you are developing the boundaries. I would be very conservative and do TRZ projections. It is lot better to be in the position where you are generating more than your projections than the reverse. I should mention that that is really important because when we -- the state infrastructure bank we first want to be there was entities go and take out debt off of the TRZ in Texas so it is an innovative approach that is new. Our state infrastructure bank is willing to do these things which is helpful for us. But they did require a backstop from the municipality and what that amounts to is that if the TRZ revenues do not cover debt service throughout the term of the loan the city general fund is the backstop or the guarantee and that is really important, too because you have to look at number two when you think about these value capture tools. They are not going to generate a great deal of money at the outset, right because you are going to take out money to build something that is going to eventually create the incremental revenue but it is going to take time because when you put down a roadway, the value doesn't automatically increase. You need to have developers to put in retail in homes and over time they will increase significantly but not at the onset so you have to think about that and create your debt structure accordingly as well. That is what I have for you.
I can take a couple of questions now. I know we have a Q&A section at the back end as well but I am happy to answer a couple of questions if we have time for it.
Great. Thank you, Ray. We have a question from Jason. Could you talk more about the formation and governance structure of the RMA?
Sure. Yes. Super interesting agency. So the state statutes govern how and how RMAs are created. We are unique because -- [ Indiscernible muffled ] in Texas County create RMA's. And that is actually -- counties would create the RMAs and in our case we had specific legislation drafted that allowed for the municipality, the city of El Paso to create our RMA so the city Council in the city of El Paso past the creation of our RMA and set up the structure, the governments the governance structures so there were a number of board members, six appointed by the city Council, the Governor retained the chair position appointments, that is by state statute. So that WIC somebody, Donny posted some statutes there. So D 70 is our statute, chapter 370. That is all the government's requirements for an RMA. If you don't have something like an RMA in your state I would pursue it because it is a super fact flexible agency that can come in, fill the gaps and get things done. Out of the chute we were about five months old when we the Buddhist $39 million in bonds that helped develop the project. Like I said, it is super helpful but I am biased.
Ray I'm going to ask one more question. This is Michael's question. He asked earlier, how small is too small in other words dollars or project, give an example of the smallest project you have encountered so in your thoughts about the El Paso RMA, when you are looking at a TIF what was the smallest amount or size you looked at?
Sure so we have got right now three -- off of the two transportation investment bonds, the smallest is for $6 million and out of that we only used about $3.6 million of it. So I think it is hard to answer how small is too small. I would say that it really depends on the gap you are trying to fill. Sometimes that gap, the last couple of bucks is pretty small and this is a really nice and easy way to fill that gap. So I don't know that there is too small. I don't know that I would go through the effort of creating a TRZ for a couple hundred thousand dollars but I would definitely do it for $1 million or more . That is my thought on that.
Okay. Great. I think I will S the rescue rest of our panelists that question or maybe you could think about that as well. I think we now want to move to Dallas McGee. Our next speaker. Dallas is the assistant director of urban development in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. His work focuses on the redevelopment in the core of the city where TIF financing is used in development. He has worked for the city of Lincoln to work with -- and architectural planning group in Omaha, Nebraska. He is -- architecture and Masters of community and regional planning from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Dollars we look forward to your presentation.
Thank you. I'm going to talk about TIFs and how we have used TIFs and Lincoln. In Donny's presentation, a very nice presentation about TIF and Donny noted the name varies by state. There are many different names for TIFs. There are many different variations in Nebraska for example. The maximum TIF's life span is 15 years as opposed to 25 or 40. There are probably 15 different versions of TIFs depending on where you are and I'm going to talk about TIFs and Lincoln, how we have used it, we have used it extensively throughout our city. We are going to talk about a couple of projects that have used TIF for transportation related infrastructure in our downtown but first I will tell you that those of you who are not familiar with Lincoln, Nebraska, we are in the center of the country, the yellow dot. We are a city of about 280,000, a growing city. And downtown we have had unprecedented growth in our downtown in the last 10 years with much more focus on living downtown and other downtown uses as opposed to the way things work 20 to 30 years ago. A little bit about our downtown. We are bordered on one side by the state capital building and the state government campus on the southern side of our downtown. On the northern side, we are right up against the University of Nebraska city campus so our downtown is very compact and well-defined. The first project I would like to talk about is the N Street protected cycle track. It Is a project that was recommended in our downtown master plan as a catwalk that could be developed quickly and with spurring on additional development. As you see we are very pleased with the fact that it is done it has done just that.. Here's a map of our trail system in the city. It is difficult to see but it is basically that we have a very extensive trail system throughout the city, 138 miles of bicycle trails. However, when they get to downtown, they end. They all end downtown so we did not have the connection through downtown linking our many trails. So our downtown master plan recommended a last mile connection through the downtown on N Street and you can see that in the map here. It connects the east side and the west side of downtown with a protected bike lane. I'm trying to get my arrow here to show it to you but I'm not able to do that. Let me -- let me see if I can do that. Here we are. Here is the N Street protected bike lane about a 17 block facility that spans the length of downtown. We have had as I mentioned quite a bit of growth in our downtown. These are projects that in the last 8 to 10 years have been developed along N Street. This is a residential development. 150 units. Two blocks away, another residential unit. This is a primarily student housing project. A third project, the Aspen project was developed also in the area. We then said how can we use the value, the increased value in taxes that are being generated by these projects to assist us with a -- building the N Street bikeway . We started with let's look at what is going to cost to build this bikeway about a $3.4 million facility and we started with identified TIFs from two of these projects. $730,000 from block 68 and another $650,000 from the Aspen project. A large percentage of the funding for this project could come from development TIF dollars generated by those two projects so with that information in hand, we then started looking at many other sources that could fund a small piece of this either geographically or a small type of use and we came up with the funding after identifying 20 different sources to do the project but what I would like to emphasize here is the project is made possible by the TIFs generated from those projects. Without that we would not have been able to do it.
When he began designing the project, we looked at a number of things on this shows you one of the things we looked at and that is changes in parking. We were able to eliminate a lane of traffic going from three lanes to two because this particular street does not carry a lot of traffic and we also then looked at eliminating one side of angled parking converting it to parallel parking so there was an impact and we were careful to minimize that impact. There was some impact in terms of loss of parking and we try to address that by adding parking on some of the cross streets and that helped offset some of that loss of parking.
We developed this with BIOS well -- Bioswale and a raised median that separated the bike facility from traffic. This is a two way path, bicycle path that was built on a one-way street and that added a lot of cup locations in terms of traffic signals and signing and when you can cross the street and when the lights turned green and when you cannot turn but that has all worked out. I was kind of concerned about that initially but our engineers figured out a way to make that work and it seems to be working smoothly. Again, this street does not carry a lot of traffic so it was easier to deal with that. Here is an example of a two block stretch of the street. You can see the physical separation between the bikeway and the automobile traffic separated by both a raised median often times with landscaping and sometimes with parking along further separating the bikeway from the active motorists.
Here is another example of another two Brock two block stretch along the bikeway. It shows similar things with the separation, the very good separation of the bikes from other traffic. What we found out since this has been installed, it was finished in 2016, four years ago. There has been additional development proposed along the street. This was a high-end apartment building that is just in the process now of getting approved. We anticipate it will be approved later this year and under construction in the spring. 100 units. It is housing at 14th and N Street right along the bikeway. Here is a project that just opened, the telegraph lofts, rental housing. And another project a block away from that, the telegraph flats which is under construction and will be opened in a few months. All in all, there has been a total of $165 million of investment along P Street and while we cannot say that is all because of the bikeway, the bikeway did influence the location of some of those develop mints wanting to be on the bikeway particularly projects that were geared toward students. What we are doing now is looking at further connecting our downtown bike system with a North-South bike system that will interact with the N Street protected bikeway and carry the bikes directly into campus. What we have on the last left is an existing facility, not attractive or functional, a bike lane in the middle of the street so we want to replace that.
The second project I will talk about is just two blocks away from the first one. This is on peace Street. This is our retail corridor that spans the links downtown and connects the various components of downtown. It was also.identified in the downtown math is a project that could be undertaken quickly and would spur on other development and I think this has been very successful as well in accomplishing that. Here is an aerial view of the P Street. The blue line here connecting the street goes all the way from the lower left in the historic Kmart district and following through to the entertainment and retail corridor and then on the eastern end, over to the newly developing antelope Valley neighborhood. It is a key link that we wanted to focus on and improve and we said this is a project that we can accomplish again with TIF. First of all we identified four goals for the project. One was to improve the pedestrian and cyclist experience. That would mean things like the notes that you see here, wider sidewalks, and a better organization of the hierarchy of the uses on the street.
Secondly, to enhance the roadway for motorized transit, to make that clearer and in some cases, eliminate a lane and in other cases, and a lane so to better define the street for automobiles.
Enhance it from an environmental integrity perspective and the fourth goal was to encourage economic growth and investment along the street. I think we are happy to say, I feel good about all four of those goals.
Here is the budget for the project. Just about $6.7 million plus an endowment and we look at funding sources, the first thing we looked at is is there tax increment financing that can help facilitate this project. And we have a tax increment district that includes a large part of the area that we were able to tap into and fund 5.7 of the $6.6 million project for about 85% of this project that was funded from TIF that was generated from the increase in property values in this area.
Then as we redesigned it, we built new heart scapes. We widened the sidewalks, put in Bioswale, pulled in Phil for the trees so the trees have a nice environment for their root system which has really proven to be a real benefit. It is somewhat costly but very beneficial. We have also done a rebranding of the street with signage and lighting and giving it a real distinctive character that it did not have before.
In the center of the corridor right at 13th and P, we added a small little park that was previously a two screen cinema that was enclosed so we acquired that and turned this into a focal point of what we call downtown's living room. That has become a real attraction to the entire downtown. We have had events and activities. This is the ascent as it is called. It Is a sculpture built by June can echo, a former artist that does wonderful artwork. We commissioned him and this is the center point of that park. Here you can see events going on at night. They are day and night and it is well used. One of the things we are trying to address here is you won't see a lot of trees because the artist didn't want the trees to block the abuse of his artwork so as you can imagine, on a hot summer day people are looking for Scheyd so we are looking for ways to address that issue but that is one of the many things we are trying to focus on as we continue with the revitalization of this area.
I will mention a few of these things. Here we have a number of projects that have developed since the project was built. Here is the picture of the Candler Hotel, an existing building that was added onto and it is a very nice hotel at 11th and P Street. This is a block down, an office building that wanted to expand. They liked their location and are pursued by other interests throughout the city. They wanted to stay where they were so they expanded their office building by building it over a parking lot that was adjacent to their building.
The next slide is the stack and a stack is a 42 unit rental housing. This is again billed in and over an older historic building that has become vacant and like the other residential projects, they have all leased up immediately.
This project is, it was an SRO, a building you did not want to walk next to years ago. That was purchased, redeveloped and now provides housing, one and two bedroom units for residents and workers downtown.
Again, on P Street with the completion of that project, we are now looking at other projects that we can utilize TIFs to assist in further development of our streetscape in the downtown area. And that is the end of my presentation. I would be happy to answer any questions.
Great, Thank you so much, Dallas. Are there questions for Dallas? Dallas, while we are waiting, let me ask a question that Richard raised earlier. He was mentioning in this community that you pay-as-you-go financing. Would you consider that in your projects? Have you considered it?
We actually utilized that in some of our projects. The difficulty that we had sometimes was with pay-as-you-go, you have to do the projects there incrementally. You can only build so much in the first year and the second year and the third year and you have to have a project that has that flexibility. But we do use that in some of our other streetscape projects that we have created a large district and as the increment is generated, each year, then we identify improvements that the increment can pay for.
Okay, great. I want to remind people that they can also ask questions by dialing *1 on their phone. That will get us here to. Any other questions for Dallas?
If not, let's go on to Dwayne Vaughn's presentation from the Atlanta beltline on the Atlanta beltline. Dwayne Vaughn is vice president of housing policy and IV Atlanta beltline. He works cooperatively with neighborhoods, city leaders, developers, housing providers and numerous other avid and public stakeholders to contribute to ABIs housing. Prior to coming to AVI, Dwayne practiced real estate before spending nearly two decades in executive and senior level positions with Housing Authority Atlanta, Georgia and Mobile, Alabama. Seeking to provide quality housing and bringing hope to many families. Dwayne, we look forward to your presentation.
Thank you very much. I bring you greetings from the Atlanta beltline in Atlanta. We would like to share with you for a few minutes about the beltline and its hopes, its goals, its funding and its dreams. I guess I want to say first that the beltline was every purpose in of an old abandoned railroad corridor and old abandoned railroad corridor related industrial buildings. So what we would like to do is talk about why we think a beltline is so necessary.
One of the reasons is when we look at our population in the Atlanta region we see that Atlanta's population is about 500,000 folks and we think, though, over the next 30 years or so another 500,000+ will be coming into Atlanta. And to do that, we need to look at how Atlanta can absorb that population and one of the things that we see on this CHART is that most of the population will be ages 55 years and older so one of the speakers I think Donny talked a little bit about traffic and congestion and I haven't been to Austin but I have been to Atlanta and traffic and congestion is a real concern so we think that this coming growth of folks on the folks that are already here, one of our infrastructure needs is a concomitant transportation and economic housing and development and recreational corridor in the city of Atlanta.
Before we get into the actual what is the beltline and all of the things with regard to our tax allocation district which we effectively call our TAD, I want to talk about that we believe there are guiding principles. One of the things that early in the balance life is we thought that we were only building an infrastructure and we didn't quite fully understand we were revitalizing communities. So now our guiding principles talk about a transfer made it public infrastructure project that is socially and economically resilient and that has public spaces which we think includes parks but also recreational spaces. What you see down here is one of the parks that is on our west side.
When we look at what our core values are, we like to call it epic R. Equity, realizing the benefits accessible to all partnerships, we can't do it without partnerships. Innovation and we want to lead with creative solutions, commitment to be accountable to delivering our service and then one of the most important is respect and we want to create trust and transparency with the community because if the community doesn't believe in the benefits of the beltline, we have not succeeded to where we really want to go.
One of the program elements on the beltline, it is formed back in 2005 by city Council. Is a comprehensive transportation and economic development and housing corridor and in our vision there is to be a catalyst for making Atlanta a global beacon for economical inclusive and sustainable city life. If there is one thing we notice in this is we don't say anything about infrastructure per se but we are using infrastructure as the catalyst. As we go around perhaps we will start on the right-hand side, we see there are 22 miles of pedestrian from the rail transit. There is going to be 33 miles of multiuse urban trails. There will be 1300 acres of new green space and another 1100 acres of environmental cleanup. I call that section sort of our traditional infrastructure. And then we start looking at the community building infrastructure and that is going to get into jobs and housing and public art and so 30,000, jobs we think will be created through the temporary construction jobs, 28-thousand housing units and 28% will be affordable and that is where we get the 5600s units of affordable housing and public art. At the top you see we believe the investment of the Atlanta beltline will bring approximately $10 billion of private economic development.
Our tax allocation district if you look over to the right side, you see where the beltline is it is sort of an oval, some people call it a pair pear shape and the city of Atlanta. We call our TAD partners our taxing authority that started all of this. Our taxing authority is our Fulton County, city of Atlanta and Atlanta public schools. They then put this down to the publicly public redevelopment agency and you will see that on the left as invest Atlanta and the Atlanta belt line, a nonprofit implementation agent of invest Atlanta and you will see the beltline there because we have a 501(c) through a partner who is a nonprofit that helps with some of the charitable gifts and -- here is the beltline sort of graphically.
If you know anything about Atlanta you see it encompasses many of the amenities. It is 22 miles and it connects 45 different neighborhoods. It is about 15,000 acres. The tax allocation district portion of it is about 65 acres. When we look at the entire area and we say beltline planning area what we mean is a half-mile of walking distance on either side of the beltline and that is our planning area. So about 22% of the population lives within the planning area and about 20% of the city's landmass is in the beltline. So we go from some of the most affluent amenity rich areas to some of the areas that need the most amenities and are not as affluent.
So how is our funding? In 2005, we had a redevelopment plan and that plan made projections. I don't that 2005 was the time before the economic crisis of 2007 through 2010 and nobody saw or at least the redevelopment plan did not see it coming. So you see TAD funds was 1.7 billion and other funds that we got from state and federal grants perhaps, charitable contributions, etc., was $511 million to $1 billion. So we thought that in 2005, Fort 2.2 to $2.7 billion we could get all of the program components of the beltline done. Well, we did have that downturn in the economy so in 2013, we looked at this strategic implementation plan and saw whether our numbers were still in my. You can see the TAD fund was 1.45 billion a little down from what we initially estimated and the other funds that we would need to complete the beltline was $2.9 billion and the total price had gone to $4.35 billion. Where are we now? That is the last column and you see there is 551 million in TAD funds, $59 million in other funds and we are at $610 million toward a $4.35 billion project. So when we look at the tad increment itself, we see that there has been some great increases but we are being a bit more conservative.
If you look at 2016 through 2021, the average percentage increase in the TAD revenues were up about 13.69%. If you just look at the last three years, the increases were significant at 16.5% but that is largely due to the big jump you see from Fiscal Year 2019 through fiscal year 2020. If we look at only the last two years, we see that the range of increase is about 7.45% and we will have to see what happens next year due to the COVID shutdown and what that does to the TAD revenues. Let's look at how we are doing with some of our goals.
The goal of $10 billion of economic development, we see that about $5.2 billion has been generated in private development so far. That is $559 million which was as of 2018. We saw a little bit, we have gotten a little bit up to 610 million as of 2019. The return on investment is 8.5 to 1 and we just want you to know there are about 2 million visitors a year coming to the Atlanta of that beltline and visiting and we hope that number will increase once the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
On the job site we had a goal of 30,000 permanent jobs, 48,000 that is I'm sorry, that should be construction jobs. The status is the permanent jobs are about 18,000+ and the construction jobs are 43,000+. And you can see we think that was going to hit our job goal pretty readily. The other thing we have done is we have engaged about 1200 businesses and by that we mean we have contacted the businesses and tried to make sure that the beltline was equitable for them and tried to provide that technical and other support to help those businesses thrive.
On the housing side, we have two thermometers. On the left-hand side, that thermometer talks in terms of the affordable housing within that tax allocation district proper and that goal was 5600 units and you can see where we are at 2133. On the right-hand side, it talks about the broader beltline planning area and that is a one half mile on either side of the beltline itself and that was another thousand plus units. So we think as a result of us being intentional we have allowed 3100+ affordable family units to allow them to live on or around the beltline. We have a way to go but we are happy about what we have been able to do.
When we look at the trail updates, this map shows the coverage of all seven of the trails currently under construction. For the first time under our new CEO, this is not brand-new but relatively new, is the thought before was to make sure we had all of the money necessary to complete an entire segment of the trail before we started. The thought has changed a little bit to say well, whatever money we actually have, let's complete that portion of the trail that we can complete and so for the first time, we have three sections of the trail under construction. You see the purple is those portions of the trail that are still under design. We think that within the next 18 months, those portions will also be shovel ready dependent of course upon funding.
What we have talked about it being a transportation corridor and so far, the transportation has been limited to pedestrian and bicycles and those kinds of modes of transportation whether it is regular or electronic bicycles or things of that sort. For a while, we had some challenges with scooters on the beltline but all of that was sort of individualized. We think the importance of the beltline is that we must get light rail transit on the beltline. Unfortunately, the voters have, in 2006 and, voted a halfpenny tax which we think it will generate over the next 30 years $2.7 million and we are fortunate to be in the list of projects and one of those projects is to extend the streetcar system up through the east side trail for those of you that no, from the Atlanta Cross City market up to the pots city market. This is the trail that has a great amount of usage and you see when we think all of that is going to happen. Marta is our local transit agency and they are leading this effort. You see that out of the 18 or so projects that they believe it is funded four of them are in the beltline and highlighted there to show where they are planning to come online.
Well how has this actually worked? What you are seeing here is each view of what used to be the regional offices of Sears and Roebuck, the southeastern offices and also later on, City Hall East. Not much is happening. This is the old Fourth Ward. There was an attempt to make it look a little bit nicer. These abandoned buildings and all that. Well, here is what has happened now. That was 2008. And now, we are at 2018. And you see there has been transformation. Multiple buildings you see in the picture did not exist in 2008. If you look at maybe 11:00 past that big tall tree, that is the same building we saw earlier. This is all Fourth Ward Park and Atlanta's Symphony Orchestra was going to have a concert here but unfortunately got rained out but you can see that this is now a vibrant kind of place. We look at as you see, this old railroad corridor down sort of at the bottom of the left-hand side. Again, another picture of that Sears building or to the east which we call -- market. This was taken -- that was later built. If we look forward, that is the same shot. There has been probably 2000+ apartments that have popped up in this area and it is now very, very vibrant.
This is on the west side under Ross David Abernathy alongside of Kroger City Center. Again you see this abandoned railroad corridor. This is what it looks like now. And what you see there, the picture, we had an exhibition of civil-rights art for several months and you see there is a handicap ramp and all kinds of things to make sure this is accessible to everyone who wants to use it.
Based on that, that is why we have hope that future transit perhaps on the left side will look something like this.
And that future transit, and again, there is that iconic building, the old Sears building now pots city market. We think it will look like this with transit and pedestrians within the same quarter.
We are very excited about the possibilities that the future of the beltline brings and some of our challenges are funding. Another challenges a perception and reality that sometimes, the notion that the beltline is coming to an area raises speculation and other prices and so we are working very, very hard to make sure that Atlanta residents don't get displaced because of market pressures or because the beltline is coming through. Thank you very much for allowing me to share for a couple of minutes and I would be happy to take whatever questions you might have.
Thank you, Dwayne. That was another very illuminating presentation. Are there questions for Dwayne? Again, I want to emphasize you can also put questions in the chat room but also you can do *1. -- With your phone.
Any questions? I think what I will do is I will start a question for you, Dwayne and I will ask others as well. We saw the "war is the before and after the recession. How do you go about doing forecasts of the TAD revenues in your case and what is your advice for others trying to figure out what assumptions to make and when they are doing these kind of forecasts?
We did some internal forecasts but we as a third-party called Nana KAPP that does forecasts not only for us so the city has contracted with this company to do forecasting on a number of things. So what we found is that the unit KAPP forecast goes of five years, 10 years and are usually very conservative. They have been a helpful guide and we are about to do a new set of forecasts within the economic realities of COVID-19.
Thank you.
Related question Mike Tom boasts. Tomas, has the beltline utilize any leveraging of TAD revenues otherwise have used bonds or obtained loans based on your TAD revenues?
The revenues have been bonded and therefore there is repayment of the bonds, a portion of the bonds do every year. That allowed us to jumpstart a lot of this. So we are looking at perhaps another bond issue and that is one of the reasons why we want to look at what the revenue forecasts are to make sure that the bond issue can take care of the debt service and other costs of the bond issue.
And are these bonds backstopped by a city source or are they on their own?
They are backstopped by the city.
Okay. Great. Steve has another question. Are there overlay zones or other standards in place to ensure appropriate urban scale developments?
Yes, we have a design review committee that on any project, that is undertaken in the beltline planning area and this design review. Committee meets with developers and understands what they are doing because there are certain guidelines as to how you connect to the beltline. There are certain things we want to see, certain things we don't want to see. One of the things we don't want to see is a parking lot. And so if you are building something on the beltline that is visible from the beltline you must hide your parking either through underground or encapsulating it in some way and we make a recommendation to the city planning department with regards to that as to whether to approve an application or not approve an application so that helps us maintain the look and feel of the development.
Thank you and Jen to thank her is asking are the design guidelines available online?
Yes, they are. Yes, they are. It is a yes and I will try to find it right quick and put it in the chat for you.
Okay, that's great, thank you. One more question here for Dwayne but I have two other persistence. How successful are you protecting the residential loss of legacy residents when prices go up?
That is one of the things that I stay up nights thinking about. We are focused on that issue and trying to hold back some of the market forces. One of the things that we thought about is a strategy of us buying more of the land that is around for development and therefore we can make sure that it develops in a way that protects legacy residents. We are also thinking about attacks displacement, anti-tax displacement fund that would help residents with homeowner residents with the rising property taxes. And paying the differential between whatever the base is between 2019 and when it rises we would pay the differential for a tenure period. We also, a new development, encourage developers to have at least some of the space available for below-market commercial development because sometimes, we forget about the commercial legacy owners who are also being crunched by these rising prices. And we are working in partnership with our redevelopment agency, with our city, housing authority and land-based to bring a suite of tools to help with legacy displacement and one tool we are using that is very important is we are actually out in the community conducting numerous community engagement meetings and so we are hearing about particular cases and about pressures before the person believes they have to move. So this is one of the challenges that we had and we are not shying away from saying it is a challenge and not shying away from doing all that we can to help. That being said, if you have any idea as to how other tools you might employ, we are open to those ideas.
Thank you. Going back to the original question, how have you dealt with forecasting revenues? In what way?
Was that a question of me, Dallas? My guess, Dallas, how does your city do forecasting for your project?
What we do is we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out but we have worked with our developers to identify what they believe the assessed value will be when the project is completed and then we work with our County assessor's office to see how accurate people would like to do is identify in a redevelopment agreement with the developer in a case where the taxes fall short of the projections, there is a clause that says in the agreement that the developer will pay the difference so we are not funding it with other city revenues. We are requiring the developer to picked that up and as a cost to their project.
There is no backstopped?
We have never used a backstop. If the developer cannot do it, we haven't run into that situation but I suppose if the developer can't do it then we would have to find a backstop but we have never used a city backstop.
Great, okay. And Raymond, how have you done your forecasts?
-- [ Indiscernible - multiple speakers ]
They were done by outside third parties so we had our -- University involved, Texas a and M did the initial one and if Ike remember correctly, it has been quite some time but if I remember correctly we have it calibrated by a separate economic development group to time to kind of to them up. Was driving our projections ultimately was the demand of the student structure bank because we need to make them comfortable that it was going to make money and the city of El Paso had to become tubal that the methodologies were solid because they were on the hub as I mentioned to the backstop so with the incremental revenue not being the the city general fund would cover it and in fact, the city based on the projections developed and actually budgeted in the early years for the shortfall to the general fund which frankly, the shortfall in the period for the budget was shorter than anticipated. That is how it worked here in El Paso.
Okay, great. Let me ask another set of questions. How did you meet all the disagreements or stakeholder concerns about just TIF monies being used only for your project and not TRZ money and other city and public functions? Raymond we will start with you and then Dallas and Dwayne.
Well, so in Texas we have municipal zones, county zones and other taxing entities that don't participate unless they elect to participate so really the only stakeholder we are dealing with is the city of El Paso. Now through that exercise, and in fact, one of the lessons learned that I didn't mention was that you have to be really good at the outset with the public in terms of how this thing works because the initial rate knee-jerk reaction is going to be that you are raising taxes and in fact, you are not. You are simply segregating taxes and adjusting the increment so in terms of stakeholder involvement, the majority of the pushback we got was not from the city of El Paso or tax collection entity. It Was constituents saying we don't want new taxes so I think once we spent enough time with them explaining how this thing was going to work and it wasn't a new tax, in fact it was using the revenue to pay for that area that came around and for the most part [ Indiscernible muffled ].
Okay, great. Dallas, where there issues about that in your case or because the developers were covering it that was left to the stakeholders? McNeil, in our case --
No, in our case we sat down and discussed the agreements and how that TIFs from the project would be used. The developer in just about every case will say I need every dollar of that TIF to put into eligible improvements on my site. The city will say, you know, we also have needs and we identify those needs so if the negotiation process we used to identify which, how much TIF dollars, used for public improvement related to the project and how much of the project will be used to directly solve the problem of the feasibility of private development. Each project is different. We deal with it through negotiations.
Okay. Rate. And Dwayne, what about in the case of the Atlanta beltline?
We think that every dollar that is coming into the DAD should benefit the goals of the beltline. What we argue is is if those goals are realized, the broader community will benefit.
And were there, did you have issues with stakeholders and how did you address those, like the school district, for instance?
Well we did have some issues with the school district and several years back, there was some litigation and we were able to work out a pilot payment for the school district and so now that is in place. If you look at the taxes, the school district got about 50% of the taxes and so right now, we are paying a pilot that both sides thought was reasonable.
--
With regards to Fulton and Atlanta, the other portions, both of them have been very supportive of what we are trying to do and the school district also but -- school district.
Okay, thank you. One more question for all of you is did the local government entity make with respect to land-use changes, planning changes, to accommodate the development that your project plans by it TIF required? Maybe start with doing?
Can you say that again, please?
So did you get any zoning changes and I think you guys probably special land-use provisions for your project that worked hand-in-hand with your TIF financing?
We do in our guidelines but the city has allowed, it does provide some things that aren't standard elsewhere. For example, from density bonuses on the beltline, you can have zero parking. There is a reduced parking ratio that you cannot have elsewhere. And so things like that had helped us tremendously on the zoning side.
Okay. Dallas, I assume that would be the case for you as well? Make it certainly is.
It certainly has. We will oftentimes work with a development that says I need additional density, a different zone, more flexible zone and we negotiate with that developer and often times, do make -- identify other incentives that relate to the project whether it is parking or diminishing requirements for parking or allowing for different kinds of use or other intense use. That is a routine part of the processes.
Okay. And, Ray, for the projects you are involved in with changes in zoning to reflect the future development in your TRZs?
There was not on the TRZ number two that we talked about today. The PepsiCo development that I mentioned and the TRZs we rolled our pretty early in the, scheme of Tran23s throughout the state so there wasn't that understanding of them when we rolled it out in the first place but subsequent TIRZs the city has put into place they have definitely considered that and adopted them. I think this is also a function of -- [ Indiscernible muffled ] so large that it encompasses such a grand area that you are not really dealing with one or two developers like you normally are in a smaller TIRZ there. You are looking at a few city blocks and an area -- this huge thing that was focused on a couple of projects throughout the zone. As I mentioned, subsequent TIRZ you're really looking at a particular area in downtown and in those scenarios they are looking more proactively at zoning to make adjustments in cooperation with affected developers and that sort of thing but again, not TRZ number two specifically.
Thank you very much. I think that is all we have today for questions before I turn it over to Charity for closing. I want to point out that Dwayne has provided in the chat room some resources for the beltline design review committee and related resources and those are available in the chat through the links. Charity, I will turn it over to you.
Thank you, Sasha. Just as a reminder, we do have our final and upcoming webinar which will be taking place next month and you will be able to click on the link above in the slide to register for the event. It is on October 22 and it is the value capture strategies for joint development and use right-of-way agreements. That will be from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. as well. As we close out today's webinar, if you could take a few moments to respond to our evaluation, our evaluation basically helps us assess the webinars that have taken place. You will also see on the left side of the screen, you will see the share window or the pod and it has today's presentation in the slide pod and you can download that there and it is in a PDF version. Also available is the value capture implementation manual which is a resource published by FHWA this last year and it covers TIFs as well as a wide range of value capture strategies. If you are interested in applying for professional development hours, again, what you can do is respond to today's evaluation and you can also send a request to value capture@DOT.gov and the email addresses provided in the pod in the upper left-hand corner labeled "evaluation instructions." So we will just give you a moment or two to look at responses and respond.
We would like to thank all the presenters for their presentation today. And we would like to acknowledge the ongoing support of the federal highway office and that will conclude today's webinar. I want to thank you for joining today's webinar and speakers, if you could stay on the line, we are going to go into a post conference meeting. Thank you so much.
That concludes our conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T telephone conference service. You may now disconnect. Thank you.
[Event Concluded]
>>
