Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout2004 04-20 PreCITY OF MERIDIAN PRE -COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA Tuesday, April 20, 2004 at 5:30 p.m. City Council Chambers Roll -call Attendance: Shaun Wardle Bill Nary Charlie Rountree Keith Bird Mayor Tammy de Weerd 2. Adoption of the Agenda: 3. Presentation of Procedure / Process of Construction of Government Building by Civic Partners: (* 45 minutes) 4. Update on Market Strategy by The Hudson Company: (*30 minutes) *Approximate allowable time set for agenda item may change depending on discussion. Please use the designated minutes as a guideline only. Meridian City Pre -Council Agenda —April 20, 2004 Page 1 of 1 All materials presented at public meetings shell become property of the City of Meridian. Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearings please contact the City ClerKs Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20 2004 The Meridian City Pre -Council meeting was called to order at 5:30 P.M. on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 by Mayor Tammy de Weerd. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Bill Nary, Keith Bird, Shaun Wardle and Charlie Rountree. Staff Present: Gary Smith, Bill Nichols, Anna Powell, Kenny Bowers and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll -call Attendance: X Bill Nary X Keith Bird X Shaun Wardle X Charlie Rountree X Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: I move that we adopt the agenda as published. Rountree: Second. Nary: It's been moved and seconded to adopt the agenda as published. All those in favor say aye. ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Presentation of Procedure / Process of Construction of Government Building by Civic Partners: Nary: I think the presentation is going to be by both Planning as well as Steven Semingson — did I say that correctly? Semingson: Absolutely. Nary: Great. Okay, you have the floor. Semingson: I am Steve Semingson with Civic Partners. With me this evening is Mike Herrero, also with Civic Partners and previously with the — there you go — okay thanks. Mike was previously with a representing the public member of a public/private partnership where we worked together. Mike on the other side of the table doing a project that has some similarities to what I understand would meet some of your goals here. So, I thought it would be good for Mike to provide the public agency perspective on a joint powers authority building that we developed together in Modesto, California four or five years ago. Also with me Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 2 of 20 this evening is Matt Caplin and Eric (last name inaudible) who have an interest in public/private partnering and thought this might be an informative evening for them. So, glad to have them traveling with us. There are many ways to provide for public agency facilities and public/private partnering and certainly we feel is the most effective both most cost effective and the most efficient if the goal is to have the public facility as a component in to a more larger scope urban renewal project. So, I am going to be directing my comments towards what I perceive as potentially your goal of linking both the creation of public facilities to some urban renewal activities in your downtown. May I say just a few words about Civic Partners? Before I do that I do want to let you know that I am really here this evening because my friends at the Hudson Company and ZGA have asked that I come in and give you some thoughts to really spur some, maybe some questions for them and while I am here I am available to answer any questions you might have also. I think it's very important that we recognize that when we talk about public/private partnering, where the private sector and the governmental agencies work together to accomplish something. It really is truly a partnership. That doesn't necessarily mean that the private sector is trying to get into the wallet of the public sector, but that it's a strategic alliance where the parties work together and contribute resources that go well beyond the economic resources. Certainly they together invest the intellectual capital to make it happen and create the development truly as a team. The goals have to be clearly identified and mutually understood to the extent that they are not absolutely parallel before you really get started in our view we have to work hard to make them as consistent and conformed to one another as we can. It is a process. It's more than just a partnership on a document that goes in a drawer somewhere and is pulled out when there is some issues that need to be resolved. It is truly an activity that has to be coordinated together and the stakeholders need to be identified upfront and really become a task force, almost like a board of directors of an endeavor. This particular side is one that we created on a project that we are doing in northern Washington, the State of Washington. It's how the collaborative process takes us from the identification of the stakeholders through some of the earlier research and this is a process to get only to the design phase. It is a complicated process, but with the dedication of each of the members of the partnership it is so much more efficient from an economic standpoint. We, Civic Partners when we get involved in a project that is either urban renewal or the creation of a public facility start by making sure that the public goals are clearly identified and communicated to us in that we accept the public goals. It's much easier for the private sector to adapt some of their economic concepts than it is to in most cases to move the goals of the public agency because that's a more complicated process and it's not just you folks that are elected officials and your staff, but the community representatives as well. So, it's critical that we identify what the public goals truly are. In some cases the public goal may be simply place -making urban renewal; it may be the re - posturing of vacant parcels or in your case, the creation of a new public facility that's part of the place -making and the urban renewal of the area; the next step for us both for Civic Partners and for the partnering team. The team of Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 3 of 20 stakeholders is to identify those private components that are there to support the public goals. We find that rarely is there just a single public goal that needs to be met and almost always it's a desire to activate what might be an area that perhaps is vibrant during the normal workday of eight to five on weekdays, but slows down or hibernates evenings and weekends and so we find that in almost every case it's the desire of the public agency that truly activate the area. We like to consider the urban plan and the urban design first from what we would refer to as the fifty thousand foot level and that's looking at the community dynamic and understanding how — what the role history has played in the infrastructure that's there and the facility that exist in the community at — or when we start, but also we need to consider what is the legacy that we leave behind that becomes history for tomorrow's generation. In the next slide or two you will see some of the economic tools that are in our tool chest for creating efficient public/private partnering projects and these tools need to very much conform to the design and the design has to be very much created so that it can take advantage of the tools. We find that the place -making part of the process is key if we are going to attract the activity generating retail that most communities are looking for in their downtown. We need to consider what that success is going to lead to, what kind of problems down the road do we face once we are successful. Certainly, it puts a burden on the infrastructure and especially parking. Then how does the design impact the availability of the economic tools and you will see 15 or 20 on a subsequent slide. This slide is Just here to illustrate that the good news is there are many tools that can help create the economic engine for a successful urban development — I think the buzz word today that most of us are familiar with is the urban village concept. But it also provides a challenge from the standpoint of the management complexity. Here are some of the tools that I talked about and I really don't intend to spend any time going through these tools. I would encourage that if you wanted to look at that page in the handout and you wanted to ask specific questions about some of the projects that we have done, I would be glad to address that. This chart is a bit mind-boggling. It is three components that came together to form a mixed-use project and it's there to, again, to illustrate the level of complexity you will not find this chart in your handout. The outreach to the community is always essential and we find that it's necessary that each member of the public/private team be prepared to be very active in the public outreach process. You will see the third bullet point there, the road show, on one of our projects where we needed to have a super majority votes in order to get the authorization for the funding. We created a road show and had an education session for elected officials, for members of the Chamber of Commerce for very interested community members and looked for an open agenda in any public meeting that was available so that our story could be told. As a result, when we were faced with the terrifying aspect of going to a public vote for the authorization and needing (inaudible) and two-thirds percent, we ended up with about 74 percent vote for the approval. It was not — in most cases the project is something that the community is very interested in, but it's the misunderstanding, the ill-informed public that really will rail against it and we found a more thorough — the public forum and the education process is the Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 4 of 20 higher the probabilities is that the higher the probabilities are the we are going to avoid the confrontational problems that you sometimes have when you are processing a mixed-use project. It isn't all real estate development projects and especially in mixed-use projects. There are challenges although in our opinion the challenges of a public/private partnership approach to development are less daunting than the challenges that you would have in a more traditional approach. What I would like to do here very quickly is just profile in a moment or two on each some public/private partnering projects and what the public goals were for each of the projects. Mike is going to talk about one of those communities where he was very involved from public facility side and is now very involved from the private side. Vista Village is a community approximately the same size as Meridian in north San Diego County. To use the words of William Hudnutt talking about a different community, but it very much fit Vista is that there is no "they're" there. Vista is a bedroom community. It had no heart and soul and so here the public component of this project was really creating the heart and soul for the community, the gathering place, the downtown. So, from a physical standpoint the public component is the main street that we created and it's been a great success and it's the place where the folks in the community now go to see and be seen by their neighbors and they no longer have to go to the neighboring town for a special dinner or some entertainment. Tenth Street Place is in Modesto, California. It's the projects through which Mike and I met and we started on the very early parts of this project — really just looking to see if there was an opportunity for civic and for the community to work together, I think, in maybe 1993 — '91. 1 am going to hand the mic over to Mike here and he will tell you about experience from both the public side and from the private side. Carrero: Good evening, it's a pleasure to be here. For just a way of background for over 25 years I worked for the City of Modesto. Most of that time was in the City Manager's Office. One of my responsibilities in the City Manager's Office was economic development or re -development. I think I will start with the question of why did we become interested in doing partnerships with private developers at the City of Modesto because I think this is a fundamental question that you need to ask yourself. What is the value in doing this? Why would you do this? For us it was simply a straight matter of economics and that we have certain goals we wanted to achieve in Modesto and particularly in the downtown area and we did not — could not foresee a situation that we would ever have enough resources at the City of Modesto to accomplish all those goals. So, we felt the way that we could achieve as many of those goals as possible is to try and enter into partnerships with private developers and we were really — we were true believers in the sense even as public agency personnel that the private development process could be used to achieve public goals and not in an indirect fashion that they could directly be used to achieve those public goals. This is why we became interested and involved in partnerships. We — I start out and now work on the other side of the table, but there have been a number of these partnerships that have occurred and again it was a way of attracting more resources and more attention to the problems we saw and the solutions we Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 5 of 20 thought were available. So, we came at it from that selfish point of view, I guess you could say. That this was a way to help achieve those goals. I kind of look at the decay of a lot of our downtown or core areas in a cycle. It starts with a lack of private investment. So, you don't have private property owners or private businesses reinvesting in properties or investing in new development. So, you go through a period of this decline in private investment. Sometimes you get out of that down spiral all by itself and it comes with new private investment. For most cities, especially I think for most smaller and medium-sized cities it takes — there has to be something to kick start the investment process again and usually that's the public agency, it's the re -development agency, it's a development corporation whatever it may be. It's almost always some form of a public investment that kick starts the investment cycle again and sends a signal to the private community that if you invest your money in this area we are going to be investing along with you; we are going to be partners. This is not the direct partnership, but this is a partnership of sorts that both the public and private sector are going to be making investments in an area. From my perspective, as a public agency you need to first set the stage for the private investment and I got a very quick briefing this afternoon about what's been going on here, so it appears you are well on your way to this and you need a plan. You need to have thought through what it is you want a particular area, be it downtown or any place; what it is you want to have there; what you want to achieve; what your goals are. Now a developer can work with you on that process. Giving an example I am working in the City of Napa, California right now. I left to go to Napa on a Friday for a meeting so I can stay all weekend. We are going through a process of developing a strategic plan for investment in downtown Napa, primarily with a focus on how to bring new housing into the area. So I am sitting there just like a normal citizen participating in the stakeholder prosthesis. But that's the first thing, you have got to get your act in order and you have to set the stage with the planners for strategic vision for what you want to have happen in an area. Then as I mentioned before there needs to be a signal to the private investment community that you are willing to invest your money and it doesn't have to be a huge amount of money it just has to put the idea that the public agency is going to invest what it can in the re -development area. Let me tell you a few things I think is sort of another category. Go into this with your eyes wide open, though. These prosthesis and these partnerships are not without their problems. Probably the most be -deviling problem is the length these projects take to fruition. I mentioned '91 because I didn't want to cheat the Modesto process. I first met Steve in 1991. This project you see on the screen here didn't open until 1999. During that time we went through two city managers, four different sitting city councils, so there are and various changes in the plans. The final project doesn't look a whole lot like the original project, so it takes a lot of perseverance, a lot of political perseverance to do these major re -development projects and especially the public/private partnerships. So, you have to go in with your eyes wide open and you need to have a lot of patience and perseverance to get these projects done. The other thing that sitting in the public staff that I got barbs at in the kind of formed guidelines for me is to the Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 6 of 20 expectations the public agencies have to have. When you get into public/private partnerships there are a couple of rules and the two that stick with me the most because I heard these complaints was the developers have got to make a profit and it may sound very crass, but you aren't going to get any public/private partnerships if there is not some profit on the private side of that ledger. I can't begin to tell you how many times I sat in meetings and got criticism as the public agency because why is the developer making — and the way we deal with that issue is we bring in a third party economic consultant and tells us this is a very reasonable return on this investment. It makes us feel good, but it doesn't necessarily deflect that political criticism. The other thing I came to believe and I think is a good guideline for public agencies and I (inaudible) that those who do it, do it. That means the private developer, if you have picked the right developer and you are in this partnership that they have you picked them because they have some expertise and they have some idea about the market, about rents and about whatever the issue may be. They are really your expert and you need to rely on them. I am going to give you an example in Modesto. The Modesto project has three major pieces to it. The billing you see on the lower right corner is a public administration building. It houses the City of Modesto's administration offices and the County of Stanislaus where we are located administrative offices. The first floor of that building is retail space owned by Civic Partners. Just this on the side one of the goals that we had in the city manager's office was we felt we could have local government that was much more efficient and there was a whole heck of a lot from our perspective of duplication between city services and county services. We thought there is no need to have two purchasing departments, two personnel departments, two of this and that right across the street from each other when we could have a much more efficient operation with consolidated departments. That was too politically hot to handle, as it probably is almost everywhere. We took the intermediate step and this building we have the purchasing department for the city and the purchasing department for the county sitting side by side. We saw this as the first step to eventually trying to achieve greater efficiencies and avoiding duplication in these government services. So, this building is truly a joint venture between the city and the county and we have the first floor with retail space. The second component of this project is the drawing you see in the center of it adjacent to the city/county office building is a three story private office building that we built and leased and then if you look at the slide on the top right corner that is a cinema. That's an 18 screen, four thousand -seat cinema that's right across the street from the public administration building and the three-story office building. Wildly successful cinema brings about a million and one half bodies to that location in downtown every year. The three of them share the parking garage. So, the example I want to get back to and then I will be finished is let those who do it, do it. We had a public goal and I am going to avoid retail for a minute because retail is a very tough nut, but we wanted a bookstore downtown. We wanted a bookstore because one of our goals was we wanted weeknight and weekend activity downtown and we thought a bookstore would be a great kind of catalyst that could draw people to a downtown on a weeknight. There is not a whole lot of things that can do that. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 7 of 20 So, the first floor of that building, we insisted that the first floor of that building be designed so that Border's Bookstore could fit on one side of the lobby and the whole layout of that building is based on that. That's kind of the public agency dictating to the private developer this is the space you are going to get because this is the tenant we want. Well, we got Borders to come to town, but they would not go downtown, they went out on the freeway and the developer and I am now the developer trying to lease this space is stuck with a very tough space to lease for retail and office uses because of it's depth. So, that's kind of my illustration of a goal interfering with the design of the first floor. With that I am going to stop. Semingson: Just to put a happy ending to that by the way it has been a struggle. We are now down to about 3,500 or 4,000 square feet of the 28,000 in that building and there is an additional maybe 10,000 or 12,000 in the other building, so it took a while, but it has been leased out. Just a couple more comments that I'd like to make and especially address the benefits of the re -development agency that this project provided the — as in most communities re -development agency is funded through tax increment and therefore, the increasing tax revenues. When we started negotiating our deal with the City of Modesto, rents in the downtown core and I am defining the downtown core, as two blocks in any direction from these two blocks that we re -developed the rest of the downtown core were 25 to 40 cents per month. Today, rents are two dollars a month. When we — when I started meeting with Mike and we didn't work through our lunch at the City Hall conference room and we went out for lunch we had three choices in the downtown. Now, Modesto then was a population of I guess 200,000, so it's maybe 240,000 today. We had three choices. Today in that nine block area there are forty restaurants. We think that that certainly is a sign of the urban renewal's success. So, it not only do the public agencies have this facility that they really wanted, but it has been an urban renewal success in that the valuation of the properties for the assessor have just gone through the roof. Just very quickly we are in the preliminary master planning and design of a project in San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo is county unincorporated community in Alameda County. The public component for this project is the new Alameda County Public Library, which would be part of the project and in here the private development is generating about 3.5 million dollars for the County's match to the State so that they can get this public library. As a private developer we're developing about 150,000 square feet of retail? Yeah. It's Albertson's anchored urban store that has parking on the roof. A lot of some of the things that we were trying to do with Albertsons, in fact, on the corridor project in the downtown Boise if you were familiar with that concept and then some substantial shop space and restaurants and 350 residential units the preponderance of which are condominiums. One of the reasons we are able to generate a fairly substantial contribution to the library is, honestly, with the dropping interest rate the housing prices have just gone crazy in San Francisco Bay Area. I am sure many of you drive by this every now and then. This is the corridor project along Front Street and I just wanted to make a couple of comments here and I have, I guess unfortunately for me tonight Ryan is here to keep me honest and I may have to Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 8 of 20 change my speech just a little bit now that I see him in the audience, but the Courthouse part of the — the Courthouse and the first parking component part of the project faced about an 18 million dollar shortfall. This was the project where we needed the super majority vote and we were successful in getting it. But that — we met the private side created the mechanism to cover that shortfall and here we did it in two ways. One substantially increasing the tax value and so one of the partners of the project besides being Ada County was CCDC, Civic Center Development Corporation — Capital City, I am sorry, Development Corporation and the notion —and where we differed from the other developers was that we didn't present to the Selection Committee renderings or models or anything else. It was the process. It was the early part of the presentation that you saw from me and when it came to describing physically what was going to be there, what we described to the Selection Committee was really very much a vision as opposed to anything hard line and we say we want you to conjure up here some imagery of an urban village with some vertical development. There is going to be retail. There is going to be office. There is going to be private office. There is going to be housing. We intend to create housing at least 500 housing units and when you peel that back somewhere in there you are going to have your courthouse. We don't know if the courthouse is going to be a Ford Escort or if it's going to be a Lexus, but we know it's going to meet your needs and we understand what your needs are. But, first of all we have to solve the 18 million dollar gap. It was through the vertical development and the tax increment and then the ground lease that we as the developer committed to that bridged the 18 million dollar gap in this project. When we started our next component, there was also a gap on one of the public components and that was a 350 car parking structure that was very much required, but it was not within the tax increment generating possibility to create that parking. At that point, we transitioned from a market rate apartment project to a tax credit apartment project and tucked all of the infrastructure that was necessary and all the parking into the tax credit mass so that we got tax credits off from what would otherwise have been your typical infrastructure for any project and we use those tax credits to bridge the shortfall that we faced on that. That is really going back to that slide that I talked about earlier that the tools and it's designing the project so that you could take advantage of the tools that are there. I know Tom we are probably eating at your time here. I am okay if you want to do what you need to do and then take the questions and answer later if that works for everybody. I don't think we have the same scheduling issues that you might. Would you like to do that? That's fine with us. Okay, we will be back if you want to ask us some questions. How's that? Nary: Yeah, that seems like the best way to go. We will have Mr. Hudson come and give his presentation. I didn't at the opening of the meeting mention that it's nice to see the Meridian Development Corporation Board here and Mr. Armbruster as well, their legal counsel. Mr. Slocum it looks like you want to say something. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 9 of 20 Slocum: Yes. If you are ready to go on to the next item with Tom -- Nary: -- we are. Slocum: -- as he gets prepared I just want to, I guess for the record, good evening Madame Mayor, Council members. About nine months ago we embarked on probably the second biggest step in the future of downtown and the first was the formation of our urban renewal agency and I think the second is coming up with a vision and a strategy and over the past nine months we have had a great consultant in The Hudson Company who has brought together, not only our group, but a wonderful steering committee of a lot of great volunteers and a group of — a series of public workshops that brought the public involved as well. So, we are here and Tom is here this evening to present the final draft of that, so we want to give him as much time as possible, if he is almost ready (inaudible---). Ready, Tom? Tom Hudson with The Hudson Company. Thank you. Item 4. Update on Market Strategy by The Hudson Company: Hudson: Mr. President, Madame Mayor, members of the Council it is great to see you tonight. We have I think some very interesting and fun material to share with you. I appreciate your time and the opportunity to get together with you like this to speak specifically about the Downtown Meridian Strategic Plan. When we began this process, we emphasized the value of collaboration in the community, building partnerships and I have to say working with the Meridian Development Corporation and with City Council the Mayor has been an absolute pleasure and when you combine that with the staff we felt inspired. This report tonight, I think, is a result of that inspiration. We were looking for ways to take the plan and craft it into something like a Swiss Army Knife tool for you. It can be a great deal more than just a report and so we proposed to City staff that we build it as a website and have the opportunity to take all the various materials that we have gathered over this time that we have had together since early last fall. All the graphics, the PowerPoint Presentations, the detailed analysis of markets and demographics and so on, the hundreds of photographs that we have put together, the various partnerships that we built all could form a much more dynamic report in this kind of interactive environment than we could do in hard copy. Staff and Meridian Development Corporation approved that and so I am here tonight to share with you a bit about the big picture of this format and then the mechanics of it. As you all know, we will be back in early May, I believe our target date was May 12th, but we are looking for a time that works best for Council and for Meridian Development Corporation Board, but certainly that week or the week following and we will go in a public meeting format into a great deal more detail than we are getting into tonight. So, I hope that meets your expectations for the evening. We are primarily here to give you a guided tour of the materials that we have here. Is that fair? Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 10 of 20 (Affirmation) Hudson: So, if you were to open up the CD, what you would see are these three files and obviously you would click here. One of the things that we felt this document needs to do is to have a voice and be welcoming. It's more than a report, it can be highly – we are working on it—hello. Steve Siddoway would choose this evening to have his parent's 40`h wedding anniversary. Here we go. Cannot find the file. I think half a dozen people were here earlier watching me go all the way through this. (Inaudible discussion) De Weerd: Council, while he does that, Mr. President, I'm sorry. Nary: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: If we could talk about, perhaps when we could do it in May, I did talk to Tom and thought maybe we could do a regular Council meeting on the 18th and would ask if Will would look and see if we have anything on that agenda and have our Council meeting off by, perhaps, Cole Valley Christian School. We can look and see if that's a possibility and see how we can set up a recording and then ask the MDC if that would be a convenient time for them to meet, too. I think it would be a strong statement to the public that it be done at an official Council meeting in conjunction with MDC. I know that Tom can't do it before the 12`h and so the 18th was the next regular scheduled and we have been trying to look at doing offsite Council meetings and so this might be an opportunity to kick that off. Hudson: I am sorry to interrupt. I think what happened was this was a very large file that was up on the PowerPoint before and we overwhelmed it's RAM and I may have to tum the computer off and back on again to clean it out because it's not – everything is slow, even the mouse is slow. Would you mind doing that? Yeah, see it wasn't my fault the program is now responding. While we set it up, just let me briefly introduce the formatting. This document, so to speak, web - oriented document opens up with a welcoming. It has a voice of the community. In this case, it happens to be the Mayor's voice that gives people an introduction to where we are and where we are going. I think it's a great opportunity to go second this evening and to hear from Civic Partners and Steve and Mike about their role in the private sector working in partnership with communities and implementing. I can tell you that from my experience one of the most important things you need to carry forward developments such as their sharing is a very clear and well supported and even adopted vision. So early on in this report there is that clear voice of the City and the Meridian Development Corporation saying this is it. This is who we are. This is where we are going. We are enthusiastically in support of this marketing strategy and the vision that it represents and then the vision is presented in a number of different ways. There Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 11 of 20 are highly interactive folders that we call tabs that enable the user to go from the home page, the welcoming first to the vision, and a clear statement of that then from the vision to a description of markets highly interactive. I think one of the things I like best about this is that the data is represented in a number of different ways. One of which is hot keys to the original source. So, if you wanted to go to (inaudible) or to the U.S. Censes Bureau and find exactly where we got it, you just click a button and you are there. If we make reference to a particular partner like the Chamber of Commerce that name is highlighted and you go there. If you want to contact them you click another button and their email message folder comes up and you just start writing a message to them. So, the degree of activity, I think, is at a level of extraordinary. And there it is. This is a great moment for me, personally, and one I will remember for years to come. It was this or suicide, I tell you. Meridian and I have had a wonderful relationship, but our technologies really just have not talked well to each other. Sometimes, I wonder if it's that I bring technology from north Idaho that just doesn't like your south Idaho stuff or vice versa, but I am committed to building the bonds of our two states to make things better. So, this is the layout, the home, the vision, and the markets that I was talking about. This is really the substance. Remember when we first began working together, people were saying we need the substance. Let's not just talk about warm and fuzzy issues, let us have the data. There is a great deal of that there. Then from the markets to the market strategy, how we are going to get to where we want to go, implementation details and then a tremendous amount of support materials that are ancillary or supportive to everything else that's going on in here. This front page is the message from the Mayor and a lot of graphic materials throughout; a little bit about how to explore this site for anybody who is not entirely comfortable with working on the web. One thing that you can do looking through this guidance is to go to a PowerPoint Presentation that we prepared that was animated that allows the reader to look at the vision of the future. It's a visual representation of what Meridian could be and in the PowerPoint format or in — we also created so you could put it in PDF if you don't have PowerPoint and you can just take a walk through the future. So, with that click this is now setting up PowerPoint and going into a presentation. It's a large file, but I will take just a moment to give you a sense of that or commit suicide. Just about everything else is much faster. Well, this is the steps to the future and again it takes a look at all of the values that you express, your vision and so on and we basically went through our own photo files, went all over the western U.S. looking at places that were representative of everything from your transit village, transit corridor and ways to use that, historic center and so on and we will go through this. This particular image if I were to click on it and fully go through it, which show which sub district of the downtown we are in and then go through a series of photographs that represent the range of activities that would occur there. In this case, it's the downtown district social retail. We did that for professional services and a number of other land uses district by district. So, here we are back where you can either back click or go to the bottom of each page and go back to where you were. The vision expressed this way, verbally, with a few images. Here is the Idaho Smart Growth has a website. You can click Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 12 of 20 on their website and go visit them; see all the different things that they are doing. Go to contacts and get more information about them. You can carry on just — at the bottom of each page going to the next subject it would be just like turning a page in a report. You can also state clear as to where you are, see the market's introduction located here at market's analysis and conclusions, each of the subsections listed on the left. So, you can never really get lost in the document. All you have to do is keep tabbing forward and you're there. This happened to be — this particular report — this is really just a button here, place order. You click on this and it goes to another PowerPoint Presentation that gave a great deal of economic information early on in the process, so I won't go there at this moment. So, key issues that we addressed, how we addressed them — wherever we had data, we didn't want to overwhelm people with it, we just wanted to make it accessible. So, we created what we call a thumbnail and click on it and then you have got graphic representation of the population within 2.5, 7.5 and 12.5 -mile radius. You can make it larger. You can print it out. There are all kinds of things that you can do with it. One of the things we like about this is that anybody can cut and paste. All of this information is readily available for any business professional that might want to expand their business to apply for a loan, contemplate the possibility of coming into the community and take this to their bank or back to their home office. The demographic pages are very much the same population trends. You can right click on this, copy and paste it over into some other report if you wanted to do that. Again, highly interactive. Whenever we wanted to or needed to provide where this information comes from. It's in contact information and you can go right to the source. Now, under the market strategy we wanted to identify what the big picture was and again because of the limited time tonight, I can't go into all the details and substance of the strategies. We have done this together and will do it with the public early in May, but the strategies are supported by a range of graphic materials and then refer regularly to — here are some of the key terms that you have heard from us before: heart of the community; home to community oriented businesses; hub to the Treasure Valley through the transit corridor and so on. Again, here is Smart Growth, you could click on that and learn more. Just about anywhere you are, anytime you hear a word or see a word that's unfamiliar you can click on it and learn more. This is important. The City wanted us to — and Meridian Development Corporation wanted us to make sure that we differentiated between tactical and strategic programming and by that, for me, it's mainly about first year steps and longer term. So, we have a series of goals that are then in a hierarchy for action. That is every action is linked to a series of higher-level objectives and goals so that you know that how or why each action is being undertaken. There are three strategic elements: organize; communicate; and build. Within each of those three strategy elements there are these series of first year and longer-term goals. See how these get highlighted when you touch on them? You click on those, your longer-term goals. And then remember we promised you who, what, when, where, how? Well, here is at a fairly high level the what and of course here is the organized goal number five target business recruitment, series of actions whether or not they are one time or ongoing it's identified this particular group in Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 13 of 20 organizations as highly oriented towards ongoing activities so it runs through the full five years; who is taking the lead and who is on the team, so that everybody knows what their roles are to be. Then those items that require more information you just can click — the ones that are highlighted, the underlined ones and get more detail. So, I will just pick one out here: Strategy Element Build. This is now basically in a ready, aim, fire format. You are not going to go into construction on the first day — there are lots of things to do before that as was identified by Civic Partners so now we are out in the build area. Here is create a strategic design pallet for streetscape elements. It is a one-time activity. That is — I have been to a number of communities in this area that have as many as seven different types of streetlamps and all kinds of different street trees. There is no strategy; there is no system to it. So, under this particular one design here is the particular (inaudible) for an action. Follow the headlines; again our goal was to make it very clear for each action what is to be done. So, this is under goals two, refined gateways and streetscapes. This is action 2 B, create strategic design pallet for streetscape elements, who is the lead, who is on the team, which year it's starting, start up (inaudible-----). The action type is one time and we had eight different categories of resources that we identified that are in this CD and over 140 different resources are listed in detail. So, what kind of resource? Who can apply for the resource? How much money might be involved, if it's not technical assistance. When do you apply for it? Who do you contact and what's the contact information? All of that is included in this. This is the kind of pallet that we are talking about here, where you have a family of materials that go into improvements in the downtown and it's remarkable to meet how often this gets lost. I was just over in Rexburg the other day looking at some of the good work that they are doing there, but it's been so piece -meal. They had four different types of streetscape materials; three different types of trashcans; four different types of benches. Really a chaotic kind of a set of activities. If you have got something like this then you are able to in a systematic step-by-step way consistently implement the vision of the program. So, that is the object there. Are you comfortable with the description I am giving about the action plan? You start with goals; you move down to objectives, get down to the individual actions. Each action is identified by what it is, when it should be done, whether it's one time or ongoing, what resources are available to it, who should do it, okay? Implementation is all about what I have just shared. It's where you are going to find the different resources. If I was to click on any of these, you would go to a resource page that begins with a table and it identifies, by category, federal, state, local and private sector resources that could be available to that category of activity. Under the support section, this is intended to help all of those people who are really going to be doing the implementation. Now, these (inaudible) I have shared with you before. For the public sector to be supportive of any kind of granting they are going to have to know how you engage the public. So, we have basically a chapter that's in the support section here that tell us what we did to engage the community. All the interviewing that we did. All of the public meetings, the workshops and so on, it's right here. You don't have to rewrite it or come up with it. When it comes time to filling out a particular grant, Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 14 of 20 you go here, you click, you cut, you paste and you are done. The PowerPoint Presentations that we did are here. Every single item — every PowerPoint that we did is listed in two different formats: PowerPoint, so anybody who has PowerPoint could go here and it would be much friendlier, but if you don't have PowerPoint you can go to the PDF from Adobe, which is a free program, anybody can get it and then you can print it out very easily and you can also cut and paste with tools that they have got in PDF. So, we have tried to make all of our materials highly accessible. I think you recognize some of these; the marketing strategy, look at the future. One of these was a look at other communities that are similar to Meridian. Five other towns around the U.S. west. Glendale, Arizona, Redmond, Washington and so on, Hillsboro, Oregon and it did comparisons between who we are and who they are; how they got to where they are and relative sizes and so on. Downtown districts are defined by as maps. Lots of maps and aerial photographs are available to anyone who would like to get to that. Market watch is a private sector resource. You may recognize Thornton Oliver, color as large real estate advisory firm here in the area that has willingly accepted our request to, in fact, enthusiastically accepted our request to link to them and to their market report, so that anybody who is looking at trends. See this market watch introduction? Click on that and you will go right to their most recent market research on land use in the Treasure Valley. We have got a number of others that are just like that. If you want to contact the fellow who is involved in getting that for us at their firm, click here and write him a note. It's just that simple. So, consistently we tried to emphasize simplicity, which meant it was extremely difficult to do, but I think we have succeeded in making this a highly accessible set of materials. These are the different kinds of resource materials, federal, state, local and private. Click on those, you get a report; you can print it out or tap into individual ones. Another thing that we thought was important was that people should have ready access to all the partners in that public/private partnership that Steve and Mike were talking about. So, we have here the Meridian Chamber of Commerce, Sage, COMPASS, City of Meridian, Valley Ride, ISBDC, our firm, Idaho Department of Commerce and Hank Hubert, telephone numbers and those kinds of things, so if you want to contact any of these parties they are right there. The object being that you have a great deal of access to the kind of people that you are going to need to do implementation, whether you are in the public or on the private side. With that, I'll stop and be happy to take your questions or get into more, let's say focused connections in the materials. Nary: Council, questions for Mr. Hudson or I guess questions for Civic Partners? Bird: I have none there. De Weerd: Mr. Nary. Nary: Madame Mayor. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 15 of 20 De Weerd: This is awesome. What a tremendous tool. Would you design our website? (Laughter) De Weerd: This is very comprehensive. I think it's going to be a great tool for us. I am very impressed. Thank you. Hudson: I am certainly grateful to hear that. That's one more thing that would keep me from suicide this evening. We spent an awful lot of time trying to make this friendly and there were a lot of long nights and even some weekends to make this thing come together. We believe, truly, in the vision that you as a council have for the future of this town and we believe the evidence is there that you are not just able, but are moving toward an extraordinary place in the Treasure Valley and I think even becoming a prototype for what great communities ought to be all over the pacific northwest. We wanted to do this right. So, we work with city staff to investigate ways to push this forward and we tried to make this a highly operational document and not just one for the planning side, but for anybody who might be looking at partnering with you in the private sector and moving their ventures forward. We are hopeful that this will work for you. De Weerd: Well, you have given a tremendous tool for MDC and whoever the director might be to really pick up and be able to run with this and setting the stage for marketing and creating vision — the vision has been created, supporting that vision and supporting all of the other elements necessary to really start a strong renaissance. So, thank you. Hudson: Thank you. Rountree: Mr. Nary. Nary: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I have a question for Steve or Mike or both. In your presentation you talked about the commitment of the community and I think it was Mike that said sometimes it doesn't take much of a commitment in terms of investment. Could you quantify that? Is there some magic ratio? Is it the market you are in, in terms of what you are willing to participate verses what the public's wanting to or entities wanting to participate? Semingson: Can you hear me? Should I come up ---? Nary: Yeah, you need to talk on the microphone. De Weerd: Mr. President. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 16 of 20 Nary: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I guess before we ask for an answer for that, I know Tom is going to have to leave and if Council has any further questions for him, but I guess I do to tie it to Civic Partners in their presentation time it talks about certain steps within the process and certainly a strong vision as part of that. I also saw in another one of their charts they have market studies, circulation and parking plan and those kinds of elements. It appears from what I have seen up to this point and I haven't gone through this disk yet, but all of the elements to support this kind of partnership or certainly to support the City Hall and the anchor it is going to be to a lot of the activity that we want in this area. Your study does support the necessary elements for the Civic Partners' presentation. You know, does it answer a lot of those? That was a really awkward question, wasn't it? Hudson: I followed you. Thank you. I believe that this is an important step toward what Civic Partners is discussing in terms of need. It's not the only element, but it is an essential element. I would add to the need that this needs to be adopted and then fully implemented and by fully I don't mean every single piece I mean with vigor and with system. That is wherever you are working within city government and moving activities forward it needs to be complimentary and supportive of the vision. I think only if we are systematic in each of the facets of the public sector are we going to be able to really succeed. You don't want to be working at cross-purposes, for example. That is if you believe this then we need to move forward with the better circulation system. We can't just do a few of the big pieces. I think the vision either stands or needs to be refined. So, among other things the circulation plan has to move forward. I also would urge you to move forward with the master plan for downtown, which is an important next step and it has been noted the last couple of days the design guidelines that the City was working on just prior to our getting started, but were put on hold until we were done. Those need to get further — get back under way. So, this is an important piece. There are several others that I think will fill this out and then enable the community to move forward truly in a systematic manner. De Weerd: Just a follow up. We really are coming out with an RFP for the circulation study. So, we are moving it. Next step. Nary: Is there any other questions for Mr. Hudson and then we can get back to the other question Councilman Rountree already asked? De Weerd: No, thank you. Nary: Okay. De Weerd: I know you need to go. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 17 of 20 Rountree: Thanks, Tom. Hudson: Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure working with you and with City staff. Nary: It's back to you. Semingson: Okay. The question really is best answered through, I think, looking at it from the developer's point of view as an investment opportunity and we come at it from a yield standpoint and of course when we are in different business economic cycles, yield expectations can be very different. But, today the capital is available for this kind of a project and very readily available, but it has to meet the yield requirements of the capital markets both from a return point of view as well as the risk profile that the capital markets would be expecting, relative to that kind of a yield. It depends on the — how much capital is invested is really a function of what tools are available. For instance, if tax credits are used the tax credit partners, those capital sources that have an appetite for tax credits today. Their appetite is not being met. So, to the extent that you skew the projects for things that qualify for tax credits either new market's tax credits, urban renewal tax credits or for housing tax credits, there is a machine out there that is not being adequately fed today for places to put the dollars. So, it's really a function of how you engineer the economics of the project to take advantage of that, but the scarce resource today is not the investment capital. But, it does have to meet an industry standard or industry expected yield. Whether that's our own capital because we look at from an opportunity cost standpoint. Where we deploy our capital is where we are going to have the most opportunity also and it runs very consistent with what the capital markets are doing. Did I answer your question? Rountree: Well, not quite, but I will follow up if I might. Nary: Certainly, go ahead. Rountree: You mentioned engineering the economics. Is that a facet of this that your entity would participate in a public/private partnership or is that something the City would seek another resource in order to pursue? Semingson: We would provide that. You may want to have an economic consultant of your own. But, we would see ourselves leading that process. De Weerd: Mr. President. Nary: Madame Mayor De Weerd: I guess I am interested to find out how the public goals are determined and if some of that can be tied into the exercise we just went through Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 18 of 20 and then where is the public brought into this process and what kind of timeframes do you have? Semingson: We — usually the public goals are pretty well established and thought through, although we have our own thoughts on perhaps how the vision can be expanded, maybe providing a menu of other things that could be done in the community that might benefit us as the at -risk developer as well as benefiting the public agency. So, I think that the goals are created as part of the process of the rest of the community from our experience in other communities. We, I think I showed a slide at what was a public forum that we were involved in where we weren't certain that the public was getting all their questions answered, so we created this environment almost like a trade fair where we had the investment bankers, we had the design team, we had the engineers, we had the property managers, we had our general contractor; our company was there and had some booths and it was an event where the public could come and learn everything they wanted to know about the project and talk to, well in fact, the planning department happened to be at this public forum and we would encourage doing that very early on. You want to try and create some boundaries, initially, but once that is created then we find that we are usually better off in the long run getting the public invited in as early as we could. Mike talked about that timeframe from 1991 to 1999 and we experienced a very long process on the Ada County corridor project also. Both cases, the major setbacks unanticipated setbacks were lawsuits. With the Ada County it was a taxpayer lawsuit that where their agenda was really to try to curtail any kind of public funding. Any bond financing that had tax advantage to it and that set us back, I think, the whole lawsuit process took maybe a year and then restarting the process again it probably set the thing back two years. In Modesto there was a couple of lawsuits. There was a rejected suitor that competed with us on the project and then there was a — that project required — there was one hold out and so it required some condemnation and the condemnation set the project back a year or so also. Those are things that you can't predict. If — in both cases had we not had the lawsuit we could have cut the timeframe down by several years Wardle: -- Mr. President. Semingson: -- you are farther ahead by the way than we would normally have. We don't have the benefit of coming in midstream where you have had somebody like the Hudson group. That's really going to put you ahead of the curve from a timing standpoint. De Weerd: I appreciate that. Nary: Mr. Wardle. Wardle: As far as the development process is it my understanding that you are kind of the overlay development within the process whereas, or do you Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 19 of 20 coordinate those new tax credits the (inaudible --) programs, the grant programs. Do you coordinate that all together, essentially in sponsorship with the public entity? Semingson: Yes. Those pieces are so inter -related that they have to fit together. Wardle: Okay. A follow up, Mr. President. Nary: Certainly, go ahead. Wardle: Since you have done a couple of these projects and you have mentioned that your only delays are — have been some lawsuits. Have you factored that into your contingency program as well? Is that — are you changing your model to incorporate some potential for that? Semingson: We are and, you know, public private partnering and place making and urban renewals really had its infancies. So, we are continuing to refine our program and boy if I said that the only surprises that we got were the lawsuits, we have had others too and some in which we have created and others that the public sector have created for us and I think besides the legal aspects of our business and the unpredictable nature of that there is also the fickle nature of retail. We have had our share of issues that we have had to resolve if you're designing a space for a particular kind of user. You had better have the bookstore there because if there is another bookstore your (inaudible) is not going to like the first plan. Nary: Any other questions, Council? Lots of tremendous information. I really appreciate all of the time and the effort. It really was quite compelling. Semingson: Well, thank you, it was fun for us. Rountree: Thank you. Semingson: Thank you very much. De Weerd: Mr. President. Nary: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I guess I would like to talk about the next steps on the Hudson study. I do believe he suggested that we do adopt this document and would that be by resolution, you know? What kind of — I think that everyone needs a chance to look at it, but what are our next steps as far as our process goes? Nary: Mr. Nichols Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting April 20, 2004 Page 20 of 20 Nichols: Mr. President. Madame Mayor, members of the Council. Typically, when you had a strategic plan you have done it by resolution. You have adopted it by resolution, so that there is a document to attach to the plan that shows formal adoption by the Council. Nary: So, Madame Mayor, I think, I guess to give everyone an opportunity and I assume MDC Board also has to review this and by (inaudible) if it's acceptable — (Inaudible discussion) Nary: -- board they would also adopted by resolution and then tum it back this way, so I would think hopefully in a month, we may be looking at that or something like that. Rountree: Mr. President. Nary: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Craig is out but I believe that's what we resolved at the last meeting that we would take this up next meeting and get it to Council. Nary: Great. Perfect. That sounds great. Council, any other business since we are at the end of our agenda? Bird: I would move that we would adjourn from our pre -council meeting. Wardle: Second. Nary: It's been moved and seconded to adjourn from the pre -council meeting. All those in favor say aye. ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:52 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) TAMM WEERDMAYOR ATTESTED: WILLIAM G. BERG, ✓( / 26-/x¢ DATE Af,,,, OF ME9",' OR, � Fp J I 1 C ER AL 19