Heber City Manager Matt Brower expressed a lot of optimism for the future of the municipality while discussing downtown plans last week with the City Council.
“You’re starting to see a very dynamic change in downtown as we speak,” he said.
He mentioned that the Ideal Theatre is selling out events, with 50 to 75 people waiting out the door. The Timpanogos Valley Theatre has a full lineup this fall and winter. And construction for Heber City’s bandshell between 200 South — which is being converted into a street more accommodating for community gatherings and festivals — and Main Street Park is well underway.
“We have a synergy that is happening already. You have people coming downtown that have never come downtown before,” Brower said.
Now Heber City officials are gearing up to again approach the Wasatch County Council and Wasatch County School District to get them on board with Heber City’s community reinvestment agency, a tax-increment funding program that would allow for each taxing entity to continue receiving the property taxes they currently get from the downtown area while devoting 75% of tax revenue increases from the area to downtown projects.
The hope is that when the deal expires after 20 years, the tax base of the area will have increased enough to make the investment well worth it.
Heber City has presented this plan before to the county and school district with lukewarm results. Now, as they prepare to again bring the pitch before the elected bodies, Heber City officials are defining projects, refining details about the potential downtown project, and hoping the county and school district will agree that the cause is well worth it.
“In your mind’s eye, be thinking about the meetings, our messaging, what we want to say, how we want to say it,” Brower said. “We’re going to be asking them to vote on those interlocal agreements in November of this year. We have to have those interlocal agreements adopted by Dec. 31, 2024.”
One thing Mayor Heidi Franco believes has helped the city grow closer to securing the county and school district’s support is becoming more specific in what projects the CRA will focus on.
“I’ve always pushed that we needed to specifically list the projects and the cost to the county and the school district. We didn’t do that for several years, as we’ve been trying all this time, as we really need to show good faith with the county and the school district that this is exactly how the money will be spent,” Franco said. “We’ve talked a lot about the projects and the cost to them, but we haven’t specifically listed them except until earlier this year. … We need to share a good faith effort to them that this is exactly how the money will be spent and let that be in the agreement.”
She said another ongoing obstacle is a legal dispute about whether the school district or county place their own representatives on the CRA’s advisory board, and those disagreements are still being worked out, but overall she believes there is common ground.
“The county and the school district are not against any of the projects. They all want downtown parking. We all want revitalization, and we know that 10% of the CRA has to go to affordable housing, which we all want and are committed to,” Franco said. “It’s just that this is tens of millions of dollars.”
She said she doesn’t blame community leaders for being concerned about the project, but she believes they will find the redevelopment and its yield of a higher tax base to be worth it.
While the end of 2024 isn’t a hard deadline to get the school district and county to sign on to the CRA and while Heber City could potentially engage in redevelopment without the municipalities’ tax increments, Brower said downtown projects would take much longer and the CRA would lose millions in revenue.
“If the county and district do not execute interlocal agreements with the agency by Dec. 31, 2024, the property taxes generated by Smith’s $40 million investment in their new grocery building could no longer be used as increment in the CRA,” he said. “Heber could pursue downtown revitalization without the tax increment, but the rate of revitalization would be much slower. The CRA partnership would afford significant return on investment.”
In anticipation of the meetings next month, he said the city is working on a website with basic information about the CRA as requested by members of the school board.
“The city has been engaging the county and school district for nearly two and a half years, seeking their support of the interlocal agreements,” he said. “Nearly every request of the county and district has already been incorporated into the interlocal agreements. The city will continue to consider specific requests for the county and district.”
Brower said the city plans to meet with the county on Sept. 4 and the school board Sept. 28.