Urban renewal changes in the works

Committee suggests potential items to be considered by Legislature

COEUR d’ALENE — Sen. Mary Souza has teamed up with a Twin Falls legislator to offer three pages of potential changes to Idaho’s urban renewal laws.

Souza, R-Coeur d’Alene, sits on the Idaho Legislature's Interim Committee on Urban Renewal with Rep. Lance W. Clow, R-Twin Falls. The committee is charged with reviewing the state’s urban renewal laws and suggesting potential changes to be considered by the entire Legislature early next year.

Souza said she has been meeting with community leaders and groups to discuss the laws and gather input on potential changes people at the local level would like to see.

“I took the most popular suggestions from the town hall meetings and put them in a bullet point list and submitted that to the committee at our last meeting,” Souza said, adding that prompted Clow to approach her a couple of weeks ago and ask if she was interested in working together on some of the recommendations.

Souza said Clow is the former mayor of Twin Falls, and he supports keeping urban renewal as an option for cities to spur development in blighted areas.

“He wanted to make sure it continues to be available as long as it is used properly,” she said.

Souza said the three pages of recommendations they created are the product of “a lot of back and forth” communication between the two.

“It’s not perfect,” Souza said. “But it is a starting point.”

Souza said the recommendations are more conceptual in nature, and the state Attorney General’s Office has reviewed them to make sure they are legally possible.

The recommendations touch on a number of subjects such as cities having the “option” to elect the board members or continue appointing them.

“Throughout this whole process it has become clear that all our communities are not the same,” she said. “Something cookie cutter is not going to work, so we tried to make it customizable.”

The recommendations also cover who can be an urban renewal board member, how urban renewal money can be spent, and possibly changing how the revenue generated by the urban renewal agencies can be allocated differently so they are not such a burden on cities dealing with the growth caused by the agencies.

The recommendations also cover transparency issues, and oversight.

Tony Berns, executive director of ignitecda, said he just received the recommendations on Monday, and asked to reserve his comments until he has a chance to thoroughly review them.

“There is a lot of information there,” he said. “I will need some time to go through it all before I can make any comments.”

Meanwhile, Souza said the interim committee will meet again on Monday to review recommendations from all of the committee members and decide what to do with them.

“There will be little or no public presentations at that meeting,” she said. “We will all sit down around a table and discuss the recommendations.”

She said the committee will decide how much of the old legislation to keep and which of the recommendations might be used to update those laws.

“We might not have a finished product or concept by the end of that meeting,” she said, adding the committee might still have to meet again in January to formalize any recommendations. “We’ll just have to see how it goes.”