Gainesville council OKs new tax zone

Dec. 27—The Gainesville City Council approved the city's second Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) last week.

This allows the city to divert to increased property tax revenues from land around the Gainesville Municipal Airport put into a separate fund to be reinvested. Much of the money will go to redevelop that land.

After confirming the development of the TIRZ, the council acted as the TIRZ Board of Directors and approved the the Final Project and Finance Plan. As investors sign on to the TIRZ they will join the board of directors, but as this is a new TIRZ, the current board is just the city council.

"The purpose of the plan is basically to prove if this looks like it is economically feasible for this plan to provide enough funding for the projects that we're looking at," said City Manager Barry Sullivan. "The city is looking at providing up to 75 percent of the tax increment. So the part from the base year, which would be this year, and any increase in the values from there, 75 percent of that would go to the TIRZ fund and could fund TIRZ projects."

The plan is to start small and grow from there.

"We are only looking at a limited number of projects, especially for the first five years, most of the funding will be spend on studies," said Sullivan. "The TIRZ is around 3,000 acres, and the city owns 1,200 of those 3,000 acres, and then 900 acres of this is in our ETJ [extra-territorial jurisdiction] ... We're basically reinvesting in our own airport."

The other 25 percent of the TIRZ will be used in other areas, like water, sewer and roads.

Also at the meeting, the council denied the rezoning of an outdoor commercial (C-3) zoning district to an industrial (I) zoning district. This property is at 1471 Southland Drive and is owned by Petroflex. The company was wanting to have the area rezoned so they could build a storage unit.

However, as Petroflex is a non-conforming entity that was grandfathered into the zone and the business goes against the overall master plan, the council decided to deny the request. There were also concerns as to what the rezoning would do to the property values.

"This was a tough call for us," said Community Development Director Mike Doughty. "There wasn't a whole lot of precedents for this ... and it would be legal either way ... So it basically comes down to the choice of the council."