by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The Jacksonville Economic Development Commission’s review of its own incentive procedures will be a two-month search for specifics. The committee charged with examining how the City spends its incentive dollars wants to bring concrete numbers to a process that was criticized for being too subjective in the past.
The Finance Advisory Committee is one of four created by JEDC chair Ceree Harden. The committees will follow Mayor John Peyton’s charge to evaluate every aspect of the commission in an effort to produce a streamlined body more focused on bringing better jobs and wages to Jacksonville.
JEDC executive director Kirk Wendland said the criteria used by the City to decide whether developers qualify for incentives was too open ended. Wendland said the commission should provide “clear objective guidelines” on the kinds of jobs the City wants to attract.
Following the committees’ work, Wendland said the JEDC would likely adopt a scoring system to identify worthy projects. Staff would use scorecards to tally a project’s attractiveness based on its viability, location and ability to create desirable jobs and wages.
Wendland said a scoring system would help both developers and staff understand what kind of projects the City wanted. Bringing more objectivity to the process would help his staff pursue desirable projects and cut their losses on deals that don’t measure up.
While Wendland supports stricter guidelines, he said the JEDC will need flexibility to pursue exceptional opportunities that fall outside those limits.
Wendland cautioned the committee several times not to install one-size-fits-all incentives. Although he favored a set of minimum criteria for a project to be considered, he said the development deals still need to be individually tailored. What works for a small business on the Northside, might not work for a downtown condo project.
Throughout the three-hour meeting on the 14th floor of the City Hall Annex, the committee debated how to structure the process without handcuffing the JEDC’s staff.
“We’re trying to provide the JEDC with a good overall structure to evaluate these deals,” said committee chair Charles Appleby, also a JEDC commissioner. “We want to put more objective criteria and more detailed criteria in place.”
Appleby said he wanted the City to start seeing a financial return on the incentive dollars it invests. He said the City should consider boosting interest rates on development loans. Most of those loans - about $60 million worth - return interest of about 3 percent. That’s about half what a bank would charge, said Appleby.
The rate is a particular bargain given the high-risk nature of many of the loans, he said. Many of the loans are given to small businesses and start-ups that couldn’t get bank financing. All the more reason to boost the rate, said Appleby.
“If the City is going to take on this level of risk, then it needs to share in the reward,” said Appleby.
Wendland said the City had built revenue-sharing provisions into several recent deals — pointing specifically to the deal with a local group to build parking garages downtown — and said the City would look to do more of it in the future.