PANAMA CITY — A disagreement over how tax money should be spent surfaced again at a recent Panama City Community Redevelopment Agency meeting.
The debate centered around whether money collected through Tax Increment Financing (TIF) should be spent on public infrastructure such as sidewalks or on rehabilitation of people’s homes.
The Glenwood Working Partnership has accused city commissioners, acting as the CRA board, of misusing money collected through TIF funds; while commissioners insist the funds fit the scope of use and have been allocated to publicly vetted projects.
The two groups squared off Tuesday to state their cases.
The Downtown North CRA, home of the Glenwood community and the most cash rich Panama City CRA district, grew by more than 114 percent from $579,925 in revenue for the 2013 budget year to $1.24 million in 2014 — partly due to the privatization of the Bay Medical Center Sacred Heart Health System.
The Glenwood Working Partnership serves in an advisory capacity to the Downtown North CRA.
Legal counsel retained by the Glenwood Working Partnership said the Glenwood community has been overlooked by Downtown North CRA funded projects and specifically pointed to a $569,715 allocation to Downtown North sidewalks in 2014.
Sidewalks, argued Mark Lipton, legal counsel for Glenwood Working Partnership, do not fit into the grand scheme of addressing blight as defined by Florida statute.
“Clearly the minimal amount of expenditures in Glenwood by the [commission] is inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” Lipton said. “Florida law defines a ‘blighted area’ as one in which there are deteriorated and deteriorating structures where economic distress or endangerment to life or property exist.”
By that definition, Glenwood is exemplary, Lipton said.
Though commissioners established a Residential Grant Taskforce in October, led by Commissioner Ken Brown, to define parameters of a $500,000 grant program to repair homes in the Glenwood area, the Working Partnership views it as “almost too little, too late,” Lipton said.
Alvin Peters, representative of the Glenwood Working Partnership, told commissioners sidewalks should be put on hold until a program is designed to repair individual homes in Glenwood.
“When you have more pressing needs, the answer is to spend the money on housing as opposed to sidewalks,” Peters said.
Wards I and II, represented by Commissioners John Kady and Brown, respectively, fall within the boundaries of the Downtown North CRA. Each has spent at least five years developing and implementing a development plan for the Downtown North.
“We had a huge number of public hearings about the Downtown North redevelopment plan,” said Kady. “One key part was a sidewalk on Ninth Street. … You want us to place putting a roof on an individual’s home before infrastructure improvements for the entire community as a priority?”
Mayor Greg Brudnicki, defending the CRA’s funding priorities as being within statutory guidelines, said the group is not called the “Individual Redevelopment Agency.”
“People were asking for sidewalks because they were pushing their babies down the road and didn’t want to get hit by cars,” Brudnicki said. “That hasn’t changed. There is still a need.”
Brown, also former chair of the Glenwood Working Partnership, said the TIF fund base of the Downtown North CRA is now substantial enough and stable enough to support both approaches in the coming years.
“I don’t know why we can’t do both,” Brown said. “The funds are there and I don’t see a reason to drop one for the other.”
Brown said he understood the concerns of both sides and the urgency in resolving each, but he emphasized patience.
“Nothing comes overnight,” he added.