Heber City Council members convened as the Heber City Community Reinvestment Agency on Tuesday evening to discuss where they stand in recruiting Wasatch County and the Wasatch County School District to contribute a portion of their tax increment increases to the community’s downtown revitalization project.
On March 6, members of the council had attended a Wasatch County Council meeting to discuss the potential for the county to enter into the agreement.
The county’s involvement would necessitate 75% of the county’s tax increment within the project area would go toward the redevelopment project for the next 20 years or until that amount reaches $3.2-$4 million, whichever would come first.
Their plea was met with a variety of reactions, but Wasatch County Council Chair Spencer Park ultimately told them to come back once they had presented their plan to the school district.
On Tuesday, Heber City Manager Matt Brower talked to the Heber City councilors about their next steps.
“This has got to be a political discussion, meaning it’s got to be between the agency and the County Council,” he said. “I’m hoping that you’re reaching out to your peers over there. At some point we’ll need to get back on their agenda and say, ‘Are you ready to close the deal?’ so to speak.”
Councilor Yvonne Barney said that, during the initial presentation, she noted “a lot of pushback from the county” and said she would like to know exactly what their concerns are.
“I think they need to spell it out for us,” she said. “I just didn’t get that from that meeting that night.”
She remembered blank faces, and blank looks, and said she really wants for the county and other parties of the inter-local agreement to be vocal about their specific concerns.
“What do you not like?” she said. “Please be vocal.”
That, she specified, might help move the conversation along more than repeating the potential benefits of the agreement.
“I just saw those blank looks, and it really kind of concerned me,” she said.
What Brower was asking, Cheatwood said, was for the council members to reach out to different individual members of different elected parties from whom the city needs support to find out what those specific concerns are.
“The feedback I got before you made the presentation with the county council was they didn’t need a more sales job on the details of the CRA,” Brower said. “So we cut a lot of that out. What we really focused on was how we were going to go about spending the increment.”
He said that’s why the city’s presentation in large part emphasized that the redevelopment project would contribute $4.1 million to the county’s arts and recreation district, a sum greater than what the county would contribute through their increment.
“As political leaders, you’ve got to be reaching out, having the conversations, getting the intel and then helping us understand how we get this across the finish line,” Brower said.
Still, Barney said she doesn’t understand the disconnect.
“I need to know where the problem is,” she said.
Sid Ostergaard agreed with Brower that a large part of answering that question needs to happen behind the scenes.
Mayor Heidi Franco suggested that before the city puts more pressure on the county council, they should perhaps shift some of their focus to the school board.
Wasatch County School District Paul Sweat, Brower said, has “tentatively agreed to have a joint meeting on April 23.”
“It is at that meeting in which we’ll give another presentation,” Brower continued. “It will be a little bit different. Their concerns are different, and we’ll gear that presentation towards those concerns. And so I am going to put that together.”
Even before then, the two groups are looking to potentially begin the conversation through a small committee with two representatives from the school district’s board and two from Heber City.
Councilors Aaron Cheatwood and Mike Johnston volunteered.