It's been months in the making, but tonight's Board of County Commissioners meeting will give the body a chance to review a revised plan for economic development incentives -- one which could open up County dollars to commercial and retail investment in the Bull City for the first time.
The inclusion of commercial and retail projects in the incentives program would be focused on designated corridors for investment, including the Hayti/NCCU district, North-East Central Durham, transit-oriented development sites -- and downtown Durham.
The N&O has provided very good coverage of the impact of this change going back to early December, and more recently in an article last week. As Eric Ferreri's December piece notes, Scientific Properties is an obvious potential beneficiary of the plan, although Scientific chief Andy Rothschild notes the current draft would only provide about half of the $6 million that the developer is seeking in County support for the mixed-use project.
Scientific Properties aside, though, word is that another Durham developer may stand to benefit from the change: Greenfire Development, whose relative quiet in the past few months has been attributed by some Durham insiders to ongoing wrangling with local governmental officials in discussions over public-sector incentives.
Significant in the draft incentives policy is the support it would allow for mixed-use developments; although only the commercial and retail portions of same would count towards incentives, the policy would support the sort of mixed-use development that Scientific and Greenfire have both proposed for some of the targeted regions of the city.
Greenfire has reportedly continued to go along the public-sector
merry-go-round with their proposals and analyses without significant
progress from policymakers; one wonders if this proposed policy change
on the County's part suggests a new relationship for in-fill
developers, which have traditionally looked to the City for much of
their economic development incentives.
In any event, expect some significant discussion about whether the County is right to broaden its economic incentives program; the subject of incentives in general has been a hot-button one around the state, in light of the rather absurd development incentives to create a glorified computer warehouse in Lenoir, along with the only-slightly less controversial programs or businesses like Firestone and Dell in recent years.
Those deals have largely originated from state coffers, of course; in Durham, much of the controversy has revolved around whether the companies benefiting from Durham County incentives actually live in Durham or not -- or whether it's a case of Durham subsidizing businesses whose employees largely commuting in from other parts of the Triangle.
It will be interesting to see how groups like Durham Congregations - Associations - Neigborhoods (CAN) reacts to the proposed revisions to the incentives policy, especially seeing as how the new approach could bring more dollars to an area of importance to urban-core neighborhoods: encouraging revitalization and investment dollars in older, settled areas of the Bull City.
Comments