It's Wednesday, October 21st, 2026, and the time is 2 p.m.

I'm Councilmember Flickinger, presiding chair of the Economic Development Committee.

I call this meeting to order.

Uh want to welcome everybody that is here.

We have Councilman Castillo, Councilwoman Alcorn, the second place runner up in the uh the musical chairs today, Councilman Joaquin Martinez, uh Councilman Ramirez, staff from Mary Dan Huffman's office, and then staff from the mayor pro Tem's office.

This meeting is open to the public and is being held in person and virtually.

We also are broadcasting via Houston HTV.

Council members and staff, please hold your questions until the end of the presentation.

If you would like to ask a question in our president in the chamber, request to speak, or if you're joining virtually, type request to speak in the chat pod.

And you will be recognized in order.

You will be advised when two minutes have expired.

Council members attending virtually, please use the chat pod to communicate.

There are eight members of the public who have signed up to speak today.

If there are any public speakers present here in the chamber who wish to sign up to speak, there is a sign in sheet at the front table on your right where University of Houston CHIP intern Haya Alani is seated.

And she's walking back behind us right now.

Public speakers will have a chance to speak after the conclusion of the presentations.

Any questions can be emailed to district K, Houston TX.gov and will be forwarded to the respective departments entities for responses.

There is a slight change in order of the agenda, and uh we're actually going to start off with Jennifer Curley, Assistant Director with the Mayor's Office of Economic Development.

We'll present on the tax increment reinvestment zone project plan proposals, followed by a presentation on the Texas Enterprise Zone proposals.

Ms.

Curley, please proceed with your presentation.

Oh,

I'm like, um, council members, thank you so much for this opportunity to present before you today.

Um today I'm going to preview the TURS project plan amendments and the Texas Enterprise recommendations that will be included on City Council's agenda in the coming weeks.

So these items will not be presented today on council or next week.

These are items that will be on coming agendas in the future.

First, I'll talk about the project plan amendments first with comments about policy, the proposals themselves and a proposed timeline.

Afterwards, I go into the Texas Enterprise Zone Program and the proposed nominations.

So TERS policy is guided by Chapter 311 of the state tax code.

It establishes the tax increment financing act, and we also look at, of course, uh the city of Houston's TERS financial policies.

Slide four.

Next slide, I'm sorry.

So the project plan and the financial the project plan and financing plan is the TURS guiding document.

It is one of the required documents when you're establishing a TURS.

What is required by the statute is a preliminary project plan and financing plan.

Any change in priorities, taxing unit participation, or boundary changes, requires amending the project plan.

The TERS board approves the project plan, so what they do is they review their current um policies, look at making adjustments, um, make changes to those policies through the project plan amendment.

The TURS board then approves those policy changes and cements that document to the city for approval by city council.

In the meantime, what happens between the steps that the TURS makes and city council is that economic development reviews the ask and determines whether those asked are consistent with chapter 311, but also consistent with the tourist finance city's tourist financial policies.

So the project plan itself will establish the zones, establish the zones, establish the zone boundaries, it'll it'll establish the project priorities, it will provide development goals and also financial projections because what you want to do is make sure that the projects that are being proposed are um financially achievable.

So you don't want to put projects in there, but we don't have enough funding for those projects.

So the project plan is going to tell us how do they plan to fund these particular projects.

So you have the project plan, that's the overall guiding principle plan, but that develops into the annual budget that city council approves every year.

Next slide, please.

Today what we're um presenting today is these four proposed planned project plan amendments.

Um the first one is Lake Houston.

What they're looking for is a life extension and an annexation.

The life extension is needed because they have phase two of North Park Drive to complete, they've already completed, or probably the punch list um area of phase one, and so they're in the process of developing phase two.

They do not have enough funding.

They have 40 million dollars in grant funding for phase two, but they need um funding for the match.

The additional annexation, of course, is to approach other flood remediation projects within that particular zone.

You might remember during Harvey, they had um a difficult time during that um that particular weather event, and so um what they're looking at is developing corridors that allow their constituents to evacuate the area when there's a major flooding.

That's that was the um that was the support for the North Park Drive project, but there were some additional things that need to be done in that particular area to improve some other regional flooding in that in that particular boundary.

Next up is Uptown.

Um this is a straightforward participation.

Harris County Precinct 4 is participating in the uptown zone, and so we need to amend the project plan to include their participation.

Um for Hardy near North Side and Harrisburg.

Similarly, there's a participation um there um precinct two is participating in both Hardy and Harrisburg, so we need to amend the project plan to um include that participation.

Also, in both Hardy and Harrisburg, there is some annexation that is going to be done in those particular areas for Hardy is to annex a property that affordable housing will be built on.

In Harrisburg, it's all um non-exempt, it's all exempt property, it's right of way, Settigas Park, and the orange show for visionary art property.