Dear Neighbors,
This coming Monday, the City Council will convene its first of three meetings for the month of May. We will begin our evening at 5:30pm with a work session on property assessments and reappraisals. The Council meeting will begin immediately after this work session at 7pm.
While the number of items on our agenda is few, their importance is significant. The first item is a presentation on our TIF district budget, revenue and debt service projects. In other words, this is an opportunity for the community to hear about the capacity of our TIF district, particularly as it relates to the potential mall redevelopment. As with any financing tool, it is important that projections are made and conservative estimates are made regarding revenues that will then be available to finance bonds we would issue to pay for public improvements.
The second item on our agenda is a resolution to authorize the City to execute a Pre-Development Agreement with the owner of the Burlington Town Center mall, Don Sinex. Over the past seventeen months, the mall owner and the City have worked to foster a collaborative public-private partnership to redevelop our downtown mall. Much of what is conceptualized for this site was embraced by the City in planBTV, a visionary document for development of our downtown and waterfront and was unanimously approved by the City Council in June of 2013. PlanBTV called for significant housing, restoring the north-south corridors between Cherry and Bank Streets that had been lost to Urban Renewal in the 1960s, more open and inviting street-level retail, and a greater pedestrian streetscape to name just a few of its goals and objectives.
The Pre-Development Agreement is online on Board Docs. Please take a look at: https://www.boarddocs.com/vt/burlingtonvt/Board.nsf/Public
I had posted last week that I would attempt to provide you with a summary of what is in the document as it is 70 pages long and there is a great deal of information and some legalese as is the case with most documents of this nature. The Agreement calls for the owner to build 274 housing units that will include market rate housing, workforce rate housing and inclusionary housing. It calls for commercial office space, retail space, an indoor child care space and a parking garage for approximately 925 spaces. It calls for the reestablishment of St Paul Street and Pine between Cherry and Bank Streets and a rooftop observation deck open to the public. There are protections in the Agreement to ensure public amenities are built to our satisfaction before any public monies are paid to the owner. There is a not to exceed price of $21.8 million for these public improvements which would be paid for with a TIF bond. A vote on this bond would come to the voters of Burlington in November of this year.
The mall owner has agreed to make reasonable efforts to provide jobs for qualified low and moderate income Burlington residents to construct and operate the Project and will include in its general contract that these workers will be paid a livable wage as defined by our ordinance.
This past Wednesday, the City Council had a special meeting where we all had every opportunity to discuss with our legal counsel any nuance of this Agreement. We discussed this Agreement with said counsel for over 2 ½ hours and the end result was a number of items that we wanted our counsel to discuss with the mall owner and their counsel. The revised agreement is now available on Board Docs.
In particular, one of the issues of concern to some Councilors and the public was the potential lease to Champlain College of 110 housing units to their students. Over the past couple of days, and in the spirit of negotiation, the mall owner has agreed to only 80 such units.
For some people in our community, this issue of height is a concern. The project will ask for a zoning amendment to the applicable height and setback limitations. While planBTV did call for height in this area of the downtown, this project would need additional height. The agreement does call for us to work together to amend that portion of our ordinances.
This predevelopment agreement is the first step in memorializing our partnership and it is my hope that it will be approved by the Council Monday evening. There will no doubt be much discussion in the months to come about the specific aspects of this project. I am confident that we can work together as we have over these past many months and build a project that will benefit this community for years to come.
As with all Council meetings, please keep in mind that you are always welcome to come and speak to the Council on any subject you wish during our Public Forum which begins at 7:30pm.
I have received a number of emails in the past week and will respond to them this weekend. Please be in touch with me over the weekend and on Monday.
My best,
Karen
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