Special Bd. of Aldermen — 03/6/2018 Page 7
of Aldermen ask me what are some of the priorities we should have or we should look at from an economic
development perspective. It came up on a couple of occasions that we have a river that’s underutilized. It’s a
natural asset and it’s underperforming. | committed to making it a priority to enhance that because it’s a
competitive advantage that we have that we should be looking to bolster and the way to do that is through this
TIF program. We did it the right way by starting out with developing a plan. A plan that had consensus by the
community that articulates some goals that we would be looking to accomplish: the big ideas, connectivity so
that river walk that | discussed earlier, doing better environmental stewardship, trading better access to the
river, creating green space and recreational opportunities, ensuring that we are flood resilient and making sure
we are preserving our natural asset for the years to come, and ultimately trying to create some economic
opportunities around the river front.
So how do you do all that? Well you do it through a TIF. When we went through the conversations this
summer, we made that clear to all the various stakeholders that this plan is a great consensus document that
will help us, guide us in our thought process, but ultimately to operationalize it you need grants, you need tax
dollars, and the way to do it is through a TIF program. Specifically some of the comments that we heard along
the way were the extension of the river walk looking to do something better with the Greeley House, improving
lighting around the water’s edge, fountains, a dock, plazas, courtyards, beautification in general, and making
sure that we were bicycle friendly were the highlights that we all want to make sure we invest potential TIF
dollars in. | remember you we would all need to come back before you to gain that approval.
Before | get to the numbers, | just want to call out the map. The map that will be dedicated to this TIF district is
the yellow. It is in your document and it basically shows you from the Broad Street Parkway to the Main Street
Bridge. It’s just an expansion of the current TIF program. The river front plan itself | should say is a multi-
phased plan that is much larger than this TIF district. The Mayor wanted to take an incremental phased type
approach. He wanted to start here and if it goes well and it is successful to telegraph this a little bit, we’d be
back before you looking to expand the district for the entire boundaries that were delineated but we wanted to
walk before we started to run.
So the numbers just to quickly talk about what we’re getting at here, these are projections, estimates, very
rough numbers but it gives you an order of magnitude of what we’re talking about. We have a current
assessment of around $35 millionish. Just using a previous tax rate of $25, we’re projecting that we believe
we'll see some new development up by the Broad Street Parkway on either side of the bridge. We believe that
we'll see some development around Clocktower. We know Brady Sullivan’s project is underway but it’s not
complete so we would see a little capture of value of that. All in, I’m being very conservative in my estimation. |
would rather be conservative and come in under than misrepresent anything and have that cause problems.
I’m saying we'll potentially see 10, it could be as high as 20 million. VE don’t know. None of us has a crystal
ball but that would generate approximate increment that we would see year over year of approximately
$250,000. What does that mean? That means that we could potentially come before you for a bond allocation
request of approximately $4 million or we could use the cash to service any type of maintenance,
programming, whatever the will and desire may be. It would go directly back into the district.
With that said Madam Chair, that’s a very high level overview of TIF and how we would like to use it to develop
and improve the downtown and in particular the underperforming asset of the Nashua River. I’d be happy to
take any questions.
Alderman Gidge
Most of what we saw up there was the money being used to get business into the city. Also to train people or
businesses here to train their people to bring more people in. You're talking about the monies that we will get
and used for like the river walk. Is there anything set up to attempt to bring businesses in that showed us up
there on the screen?
