Special Board of Aldermen 03-15-2021 Page 17
of the City employees. It is going to be done by an environmental engineering firm who knows how to do it,
will take the readings from the monitoring wells that are installed pursuant to specifications that the EPA will
approve and then reports will be generated. It is very likely that copies of those reports will be provided to
the City, will be provided to DES, perhaps EPA as well, perhaps the Army Corp of Engineers. Those
reports will contain a certification by a qualified engineer, probably on a list of approved firms that the State
and Federal Government have vetted over the course of time. And that certification will provide that there
is no breach of the slurry walls, no leaks from the containment vault. And those will be monitored on a
periodic basis, perhaps as often as once a year. When there are problems, presumably the documents will
require that the developer or the developer’s successor in interest, has to provide for whatever necessary
repair or remediation is then required.
Now how do you provide for that going forward in perpetuity? Well if you’ve got a commercial facility that is
going to be passed from owner to owner of the entire complex and that facility will be generating a stream
of revenue extending out indefinitely, you somehow get a security interest in that stream and you use that
money to pay for whatever remediation is necessary. Now if you are talking about the property being sold
off to individual homeowners, condominium unit owners, there are ways to put these provisions in the
documents; the condominium declaration, the homeowner documents, reference them in the deed, upon
sale of any unit or any home. When a problem occurs the idea that you are going to take someone’s home
away if they don’t pay the $1,000.00 assessment, you know, if you have 300 homes and you assess each
$1,000.00 per year, perhaps you get $300,000.00 a year and maybe that goes to pay an appropriate
amount toward remediation, but we don’t know how much that is going to cost ever either. If someone just
can't afford it, are we really going to take their home away? So that’s one of the worries that you can have
today about what provision will you have for the financial viability in the event of something going wrong.
All of these things and that’s just one, but all of these things, have to be worked out, have to be the subject
of negotiation and that will happen. | mean there’s nothing for you to approve tonight. | think if any of you
feel like never under no circumstances will | ever approve a TIF, maybe you could say that, and if you
mean it, that'll give Tim some idea of stay away from that going forward. But there’s not point now in
saying “well | approve of TIF’s” or “I don’t approve of TIF’s” or “I want a TIF of X dollars, X percentage or Y
percentage”. We don’t know enough now to even have a clue of what kind of numbers we are talking of.
But anyway, long winded way to say you are not foreclosing yourself from anything you may want in the
future but anything you do tonight.
President Wilshire
Alderman Lopez?
Alderman Lopez
Yes, so | know | am in the meeting too and there’s no actual motion or anything being proposed. My
question was specifically what would it look like if we were to put those provisions in because we are
describing a very complicated endeavor that is only just getting off the ground, but which also has a little bit
of a history behind it of miscommunication and confusion. So should we be looking at the TIF as a
potential vehicle for mandating how that is done? Or would it be more likely some of the things that you
have referenced as possibilities, is when the developer figures out what he wants to do, do we look at if he
is subdividing it and selling it to people? Do we look a condo association or | mean is there other tools that
| haven't thought of such as does the property currently owe back taxes to the City or something that we
can use as leverage to say, “OK well you can resolve this debt if you agree to the following”?
Attorney Bolton
| don’t know the answer as to what the tax situation is, maybe Tim does. But | don’t think we are far
enough along to start saying tonight what we might agree to. | think we have to wait and see, at some point
they are going to say they want the City to contribute up to X dollars. Now if | was in one of your seats |
would say the City’s contribution is going to be somewhere between none and very small. And you can
