The Jonathan Alder Board of Education has a couple of months to review Plain City’s planned Economic Development Incentive Policy (EDIP) before the plan is put in place.
Jason Stanford, the village’s development manager, presented the draft at the regular March board meeting Monday night and told school officials that he hopes the board will be supportive.
He said it’s important to the village that the school be brought to the table earlier in the process so it has a say in how growth and development is handled – especially in the way tax incentives are doled out.
Right now, the policy draft stipulates that businesses benefitting from tax abatement programs would be obligated to enter into a PILOT arrangement if the abatement exceeds 75% for 10 years, Stanford said.
“Why 75%, 10 years? That’s the state cap for what the school board needs to approve,” he said. “We’re completely willing to do this and I think a lot of communities have worked out similar arrangements with other school districts.”
Plain City currently has nine Community Reinvestment Area (CRA) abatements but Stanford said the district doesn’t receive revenue from those because none of the uptown businesses exceed a $1-2 million payroll. He said that’s where the notion of a standard PILOT could come into place and the hope is that the district will standardize a percentage on that agreement.
As it stands, Plain City does not have an incentive policy but Stanford said officials are working on the draft and it is “99% completed.”
He said a big issue for the village and schools is that there are limited protections for the school district.
“We felt the abatements, the way they were structured, really had inadequate considerations for your interests,” Stanford said. “And then also, I’ll admit this, there has been some better need for community-impact considerations. Are the incentives that the village is doing, are they appropriate and are they the maximum impact for the community need.”
The proposed EDIP would consider those issues and offer better guidance on how to grant approvals moving forward, he added.
While the goal of the policy would be to foster business growth and investments, Stanford said the village wants to facilitate a “prompt and fair” negotiation process.
Stanford was joined by Nate Green from the Montrose Group, an economic development consulting firm that worked with the village on its economic development strategic plan.
Green said getting these policies in place will help the village and schools in the future.
“The communities that are able to attract the most growth, the most investment from both residential, mixed use, industrial, commercial, whatever it may be, they have polices in place like we’re talking about here,” Green said.
The EDIP will clarify roles of all the parties involved and to eliminate risk, he added.
“In economic development, one of the things we’re trying to do is take away – I’ll call it risk – risk to all of you, risk to the village, risk to the businesses,” Green said. “When you have economic development plans like this in place, we got to take some risk out of the equation because you all know how the rules are played…and essentially when the businesses come in, we can say, ‘here is our economic development incentive policy. This is how we’re going to do things going forward.’”
District officials were receptive to the policy though board member Bruce Hooley said he wanted to be careful not to just agree to a pre-determined standard.
Green said the highest percentage for PILOT payments is typically 30% and Hooley said that number seems low.
“This is a very desirable community, located where it is next to Dublin and I don’t want you to give away the farm just because it’s customary,” he said. “People want to be located in a great area and this is a great area…So, I don’t see that industry standard on percentage compensation needs to be that low given what companies are getting by locating here.”
Stanford said the policy aims to keep those imbalances in check and outlines thresholds for CRAs as well as thresholds for enterprise zones (EZ) in the future and sets higher requirements for tax increment financing (TIF) agreements, focusing on non-school TIFs.
“It’s a mutual concept that I really hope you guys embrace,” Stanford said. “(Council has) been briefed on it but this will be the full presentation April 3. They will review it and then we anticipate approval at the end of April and early May will be implementation; however, depending on the feedback we get from you guys, we’re completely open to revisiting that PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) concept.”
He said he hopes the district can review the draft policy and have feedback ahead of the summer break.
“We want to include you guys. We want to come to some kind of arrangement that makes it beneficial for all of us,” Stanford said. “So, at some point in the next quarter or so or maybe before summer break, if we can work out that provision and you guys are open to that, we could settle on a percentage and then get that agreed on. We can go back and amend the policy, drop it back in the policy, have council sign off and we can go from there.”