The Finance Committee met on November 11, 2025, at 3:00 PM in City Hall Council Chambers to review and discuss proposed operating budgets for the Economic Development, Engineering, Public Works, and Police departments for fiscal year 2026. The meeting included presentations on accomplishments, goals, and budget requests. No public comments were received.
All right, good afternoon, everybody. It's three o'clock. We will call to order the City of Delaware's Finance Committee meeting for November 11th, 2025. Roll call, please. Mr. Hoffman. Here. Mayor Rickel? Chair Schaefer. Yeah. Item two's approval of the motion summary. Approval of the motion summary of the finance committee meeting held on November 3rd, 2025 is recorded and transcribed. Move for approval. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed. Item three is public comment. Do we have any emails or otherwise? No, sir. And we have no public, so I think we're good. All right, we'll move into review and discussion. First up, Nick Link for economic development. Greetings, members of the Finance Committee. First off, I'd like to start with some accomplishments that we had in fiscal year 25. So I'd say our biggest project we've been working on is the OBJ Meradell project. So we got the Zoein approved. We got the school compensation agreement approved by the Delaware City School District. A couple more hurdles we'll have to get over, but I'm pretty pretty hopeful we can break some ground in quarter one of next year. And stop me anytime you have questions. We drafted an RFQ for the downtown hotel last week, or actually on Monday, it's yesterday. We received four proposals. So we're going to start grading those and ultimately inviting two or three to submit full-blown proposals with ultimate disposition slated to come from the county CIC. Affordable housing, so we've got Greenwood Commons. Home port, they broke ground this uh last week. Um the reserve at Northbourne, which um has all their entitlements in place. They haven't broken ground yet. That's a metro development. So uh 157 units at or below 60 percent AMI. So um, you know, trying to keep pace with the the housing that's needed for uh keeping up for workforce development and ultimately just uh you know be good stewards for our citizens. Um groundbreakings and pipeline, so the Cobra Marketplace over where the city manager lives nearby. I'm sure Paul's been keeping track of that more than I have, but they're um definitely moving some dirt. Uh Pittsburgh Flex uh broke ground uh last quarter, so that's um at the corner of Pittsburgh Drive and section line, 55,000 square feet of industrial flex space. Um and then Foundations Health, uh which is the senior living facility across the street from Kroger Marketplace. Um and then Fed One Innovation Court, which has not broken ground yet, but has the entitlements in place and are currently working through those the ability to break ground soon. Uh strategically, we adopted the citywide CRA policy and included provisions for mixed income housing. Um I've created the highest best use sort of land development program, which um uses this uh test fit program that we have that essentially um kind of helps some ideations for different land development uh in conjunction and working with um the planning department uh uh attract highest and best use for uh major land projects, uh Catalytic sites. Um we've launched a new program, the Vacant Box Showcase. That's going to be happening on um December 2nd. It's a new downtown event. Um hoping it goes well, and then we can just do it every year, maybe do it twice a year.