ITHACA, N.Y. — Wednesday night’s city of Ithaca Planning and Economic Development Committee had good news when you didn’t expect it. For one, despite starting a half-hour late due to technical difficulties with the video stream, the meeting actually finished earlier than anticipated. That’s a pleasant surprise compared to the deceivingly short agendas that become four-hour marathons. For two, the city received some surprise good news from the feds regarding their West End traffic discussion that his occupied the planning department’s minds as of late.
Anyway, let jump right into it. Agenda link here.
City defers to IDA on CIITAP Tax Abatement Review
This is a continuation of last month’s discussion on the City of Ithaca Community Investment Incentive Tax Abatement Program (CIITAP) application process for Tompkins County Industrial Development Authority (TCIDA) property tax abatements within the city of Ithaca’s density district. Typically, the city does its review, holds a public hearing and decides whether or not to endorse an application, and then the applicant begins to review process with the Tompkins County Industrial Development Authority (IDA). The city’s vote is non-binding; the IDA can decide what they please, but the city’s endorsement is usually a big factor in whether or not a project gets their abatement, especially since city officials sit on a number of sub-committees, and one of the IDA’s seven votes is a city councilor (currently the Fifth Ward’s Laura Lewis).
However, there is a problem — the county and city’s applications are the same in most respects, but they don’t quite match on workforce housing policy. The county offers an opt-out payment to the Community Housing Development Fund that the city does not, and the percentages and area median income cutoff differ slightly (20% of units at 75% area median income in the city’s application, 20% of units at 80% area median income in the county’s.) As city staff admit in the memo, “(t)his process is complicated and unnecessarily confusing and creates an opportunity for inconsistencies between the two reviewing bodies.”
To fix this, two options were being explored. Either the City tells the IDA that it endorses any projects that meet its criteria and eliminate the city’s application, therefore letting the IDA handle the review since they’re the decision-makers, or if the city wishes to maintain its own review process, that it be simplified to the base criteria of location, density, size and municipal compliance, while the IDA will tackle diversity, local labor and housing requirements in its portion.
Last month, they decided to hold off on discussing this procedural portion until they could get someone from IDA in to field questions. A proposal to expand the density district was defeated last month in a 3-2 vote.
Picking up where last month left off, Tompkins County Area Development’s (TCAD) President Heather McDaniel came to speak to the PEDC. I know we’re getting into a bureaucratic alphabet soup here, but all you need to know is that TCAD oversees the administration of the IDA.
McDaniel explained that, at its core, the IDA is an economic development agency; while Ithaca and Tompkins County have long had issues with housing affordability that impact economic growth, it’s not the IDA’s area of expertise. After multiple meetings with city officials and staff, the latest affordable housing policy crafted by the IDA calls for either a 20% mandatory affordable housing component at 80% area median income or less, where another organization would monitor for compliance and would remain affordable over the period of a 7-year or 10-year tax abatement, or make a payment of $5,000 per unit into the Community Housing Development Fund (CHDF), the jointly-managed county program for local affordable housing grants. $5,000 per unit may not seem like a lot, but because it’s been earmarked and ready to be allocated and it can be used to demonstrate community support, affordable housing builders can leverage it with other grant applications. The CHDF typically awarded about $7,500 per unit, and the average leverage with state and federal grants brings that to $150,000 per unit, enough to get the shovels in the ground.
“For a project, if we had a 200-unit proposal, the developer could provide a 20% set-aside of 40 units, required to be affordable for the term of abatement (say, 10 years). The other option would be $5,000 for each of the 200 units, for a $1 million payment to the fund, which at $7,500 per unit on average for the fund, could support 133 units of affordable housing since developers will leverage other resources,” said McDaniel.
McDaniel made it clear this is all rather exploratory, and the set-aside/fee choice is a high-enough bar that it would probably force the cancellation of some smaller developments. “The Carey Building would have been underwater with this. We don’t know what the perfect number is, but the committee agreed to revisit it in a year. If every housing project gets their financing, we’ll adjust it up. If projects struggle to get financing, especially in this (low mortgage /cheap loan) environment, then we’ll go back to the drawing board. We’ll continue to gather information, and who knows how many housing projects will move forward, but the idea is to get this policy in place. The least we’d like to do is work with the city to align our guidance with the city’s, and clean up the language so that projects would know where they need to go and what requirements they need to meet.”
As McDaniel opened the virtual floor to committee questioning, councilor Donna Fleming (D-3rd Ward) started by making it clear she didn’t like the IDA supporting housing, affordable or market-rate. “It seems to be that plenty of developers are able to start projects downtown without a tax abatement. We need more of an industrial base and diversity of jobs. I would be okay with you pulling back to your primary focus.”
“The IDA has supported every single downtown multi-story project,” said McDaniel. She noted two older mixed-use developments from the 2000s use New Market Tax Credits, which are non-IDA federal tax credits, but one of those projects required three years to go from approval to construction, and the other is financially underwater and trying to sell. They’re extremely difficult to get and often not enough to make a project viable. “Me seeing the financials underneath, the costs of development downtown are very high and continue to be very high.”
“I do agree that I would like to see the IDA revert to its mission of job creation rather than real estate development. We’ve seen a flurry of activity Downtown that has benefited, and the impacts of foregone tax dollars was significant…I do feel it is time to reassess and put this baby to bed and not utilize it as a resource anymore. I would 100% be in support of taking it even farther and eliminating the density incentive for the city,” said councilor Cynthia Brock (D-1st). Brock has long been an opponent of CIITAP, and if you’ve watched meetings over the years, Brock and dense urban development go together about as well as oil and water.
As for discussion of the resolution itself, Brock remained firm that she wanted to eliminate CIITAP completely, which Committee Chair Seph Murtagh (D-2nd Ward) was hesitant to take up because that involves the IDA’s powers, and he wanted them to be a part of that discussion. As far as Brock was concerned, if the IDA didn’t need the city’s approval to review CIITAP applications (and it seems like that was only a fairly recent legal discovery), it wasn’t worth having and the city shouldn’t be promoting density anyway. “The city has no authority in this, CIITAP is just a recommendation,” Brock said.
The rest of the board felt that, given the city’s advisory-only role, that rather than simplify its own process, they would defer the application process to the IDA, and remove the city’s advisory role in the application process so long as the IDA adopted the city’s CIITAP endorsement criteria. The motion passed 4-1, with Brock opposed, and will head to the full Common Council for approval next month.
Surprise funding award upends West End traffic couplet discussion (in a good way)
Everyone was going into this meeting expecting a bruising discussion. As previously reported, the New York State Department of Transportation is seeking a plan to alter traffic patterns, with the intent to reduce congestion and increase safety. As proposed, the 600 Block of West Buffalo Street would change from a two-way street to a one-way eastbound between Fulton and Meadow Streets. One block south, the 700 Block of West Court Street would either be converted to a one-way westbound route, or otherwise expanded to increase westbound traffic capacity. Collectively, the proposed West Buffalo and West Court Street changes are referred to as a “one-way pair”, also called a “couplet” – two one-way streets whose traffic flows combine on both ends.
However, as with anything that impacts something as sensitive as commuters, a traffic study of Route 13 and intersecting roads still needs to be carried out to determine the potential feasibility and impacts of the DOT proposal. The issue, as it often is, was money – who was going to pay for what. NYSDOT has insisted in memos that their plan was fine, but city staff and elected officials, not so much. With no clear money for a study to verify DOT’s claims, and with DOT having the power to stop projects along the Route 13 corridor until a study or the couplet plan was approved, it was starting to look ugly.
The day of the meeting, however, good news came out of the blue. A U.S. Department of Transportation BUILD infrastructure planning and design, worth nearly $1.37 million. The grant has a dollar-for-dollar match component, but the planned improvements to Route 13 by the City Harbor and Carpenter Park projects, which are worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars, count towards that. That reduces the city’s burden considerably.
City Planning Director JoAnn Cornish was elated. The money is allotted for study and design improvements for the section of Route 13 between Purity Ice Cream and Fall Creek, but planning staff are hopeful that U.S. DOT will let them look at the couplet proposal as part of the study area as well. With any hope, this grant will allow the city to do the traffic study before committing to NYSDOT’s couplet proposal.
“The city has a multi-modal vision for the West End, (NYS) DOT wants cars through there as fast as possible. Two different approaches. But with the new BUILD grant today, there’s an opportunity to work with (NYS) DOT and explore the couplet and transformation of Route 13,” said Senior Planner Lisa Nicholas.
“We have a fundamental difference in vision for Route 13 with (NYS) DOT. They want to move cars. We want to see the neighborhood knit together and not have 13 be such a dividing line for the city,” added Cornish.
“The blessing and curse of this community is that you have to come through here to get to the other side of Cayuga Lake. I know we strive to reduce the use of cars in our community, but to get east and west, you have to come through that bottleneck,” said councilor Brock. “A significant part of our traffic is beyond our control. Summertime traffic is outrageous, but it’s from people coming through trying to get to properties on the lake…Just remember that is one of the forces we have to contend with.”
Chair Murtagh, on the other hand, expressed a renewed optimism for a satisfactory resolution on the couplet conundrum. “I don’t think the couplet plan is perfect at any rate. (NYS) DOT is looking at this from a 10,000-foot view. Circulating cars is their primary focus, and we have a different vision. 24 hours ago, we were wracking our brains trying to figure out how to move forward with this, where the money for the study would come from. This BUILD grant is a real game-changer, I think we have an opportunity now, and it’s nice to have the money to invest to do some planning and making the corridor into something the community can value.”
While this is a happy turn in the traffic discussion, the award of the BUILD grant is rather curious. The city has lobbied for a BUILD grant for a decade without reward. This year, they didn’t even bother promoting their BUILD application, yet it was selected.
The morning after the meeting, political news website POLITICO reported that the U.S. DOT awarded the vast majority of the funds to political swing states and Kentucky, the home of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and his wife DOT Cabinet Secretary Elaine Chao. The awards have resulted in accusations that they are a blatant play by the Trump administration to swing votes in swing states to Donald Trump’s presidential re-election campaign. Furthermore, states expected to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, so-called “blue states”, received very little funding from U.S. DOT. In fact, Ithaca’s $1.37 million grant was the only one awarded to New York out of the $1 billion in awards, and out of many applications from New York State.
So why Ithaca? POLITICO noted that Ithaca is in Congressman Tom Reed’s district, NY-23. Reed was among the earliest to express and remains an ardent supporter of Donald Trump. It may be that the award was made to Ithaca as an intended favor to Reed and his own re-election, though without the attention to detail that notes Tompkins County consistently gives Reed the lowest percentage of its votes out of any in his district in congressional elections. A U.S. DOT spokesperson refuted these claims, saying the decisions are driven by career DOT staff and not political appointees. But given the POLITICO report, it’s possible Ithaca may be benefiting from a miscalculated political favor.
Green New Deal and Carpenter Park Updates
In other news, Cornish noted that the Green New Deal building code supplement is being worked on, the advisory committee has been meeting for a few months now after going on hiatus during the spring peak of the pandemic, and the draft will be out by the end of the year for adoption by Common Council in early 2021. The city will be hosting an “e-Class” on Green New Deal topics, to get city staff and residents familiar with the jargon and terminology of different phases in the deal. Next week will start things off with a class on carbon neutrality, so keep an eye on your neighborhood list-serves. Cornish credited Anne Rhodes and the late Kirby Edmonds for much of the committee’s planned educational series.
Planning staff also gave an update on the Carpenter Park project to the PEDC. Most notable is that the affordable housing is now in the first phase with the new Cayuga Medical Center office building. The project team is applying for affordable housing grants, and potential final approval of the project would help get them an award, according to comments from state officials. If they don’t get funding, they can’t move forward with the rest of the project, as stipulated by the legal language proposed as part of the project’s approval.
On a minor note, city staff realized a couple of sections of the waterfront zoning code made reference to obsolete zoning, and needed to be updated to the current zoning. Since the change involves nothing but updating language, after about thirty seconds of discussion the PEDC voted unanimously to send the changes to the full Council for acceptance.