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Slamming the brakes on downtown revitalization

By C.T. BOWEN
Published June 25, 2006

The city of New Port Richey actually used the word "cooperative" to describe its initial downtown revitalization two decades ago.

A better description today is contradiction. Or even kaput.

The public-private partnership disintegrated when a City Council majority rebuked Peter Altman and Ken McGurn, the developers of Main Street Landing, a townhouse and retail complex that represents the first significant private-sector investment in downtown redevelopment. McGurn and Altman are pulling the plug on the planned $31-million project that grew to $45-million because of escalating construction costs and other delays. They wanted permission to form a Community Development District, which would allow them to use bonds to pay for up-front infrastructure costs with future increased property tax revenue as repayment.

It's not so much that the council majority said no, but the way they said it. They raised objections about, among other things, designs, targeted customers and potential retail tenants. One council member more or less called it a bluff for better terms and expressed disbelief toward McGurn's sincerity at taking a loss on the project. They must have forgotten that the council voted just two years ago to give the developers a $1.25-million incentive grant to guarantee their participation.

"If I was another developer, my brakes would bring me to a screeching halt right now," said Mayor Dan Tipton, who found himself on the short-end of a 3-2 vote.

Tipton has some institutional knowledge of New Port Richey that clearly is missing among other council members. He remembers the downtown decay of the mid 1980s.

"I wouldn't even drive through the city. It was depressing," said Tipton, who changed his mind and moved within the city limits in 1990.

By then, the improvements had started just a few years after New Port Richey's community leaders committed to revitalizing the deteriorating downtown. There was a sense of partnership among the government, businesses and residents as they formed the Downtown Cooperative to usher in a new era through grants and technical advice from the state, a funding mechanism to keep new property tax dollars available for downtown improvements, and a city investment of millions of dollars in decorative sidewalks, street lights, benches, street paving, Sims Park amenities, and a riverwalk.

The biggest cheerleaders may have been Altman, then a youthful City Council member who would later become mayor and a county commissioner, and Marilynn deChant, picked to be executive director of the Downtown Cooperative.

Altman had a clear vision for downtown. DeChant, now on the council, demonstrated murkier optics this week. Ditto Matthew McCaffery and Thomas Lackey.

The three council members didn't like future property tax payments being committed to pay for the infrastructure. But that is exactly what the redevelopment tax plan - known as Tax Increment Financing or TIF - requires. Increased property tax payments must be spent for redevelopment components whether it be cops on the beat, more code enforcement or bricks and mortar stuff: Sidewalks, parking, decorative street lighting or drainage - the very things for which Altman and McGurn proposed to use it .

McCaffery worried about future bond ratings for the city. DeChant's arguments varied from the project's being too complex and too large for either the city or the developers to handle to not liking the setbacks. Lackey, more times than not, takes an obstructionist role, unless the topic is raising his own salary.

Their reticence, in some ways, is understandable. It was a difficult decision. And the frames of reference are narrow: Lackey lived out of state when the city began its revitalization and moved here only three years ago. McCaffery was only 5 years old when the city committed to redevelopment.

DeChant's lack of support is the hardest to understand, given her longtime ties to the effort. Despite public pleas for a reconsideration, she said she will not change her position. She also believes the property, a little more than 3 acres at the edge of the Pithlachascotee River, is too valuable not to be developed.

Maybe. Or the gateway to downtown New Port Richey could be a barren lot for several years to come.

Two days after the decision in New Port Richey, the Tampa City Council moved forward with a redevelopment plan for 48 acres of Tampa Heights that also involves a Community Development District to pay for costs. Its won near universal acclaim.

"We're not Tampa," said deChant. "Tampa is Tampa, and New Port Richey is New Port Richey."

Well, for a city with ambitions to be the next Dunedin, New Port Richey could also be the next Hooterville.

Reach C.T. Bowen at bowen@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 25, 2006, 04:18:50]