What we're all about.

So through that came through five priorities of strengthen downtown small business community, activate and invest across the downtown district, build Lafayette's downtown identity, create a more welcoming and connected downtown and position the DDA as a strategic partner and champion.

So for the small business priority, you know, a desired outcome would be a healthy and diverse and resilient downtown business community where businesses can open, grow and thrive.

And some things that I'll likely put on that work plan is you know, continue to refine our downtown improvement grant, business retention and expansion.

And something that Faith brought up was you know, we might not have the funding for our pathways to ownership, but can we create a guide or really help people for them to be prepared when the time comes?

Um for you know activate invests throughout the downtown district, more active, occupied, and invested in properties across the DDA district, particularly in areas where significant vacancies are opportunities for reinvestment.

Um this has a lot to do with making sure that we have outreach property owners, making sure that we can kind of play that matchmaker, or if they need some assistance in filling a vacancy, we're there to help them through that.

Um and so this is really just making sure that those who have long-term stake in the district we have a relationship with and can help them whatever stage of redevelopment they might be in.

Build Lafayette's destination identity.

Um I think that this is really relevant, especially since we have a new marketing consultant.

There's some opportunities about Sundance.

So more people near and far recognize Lafayette's unique character, knowing what's happening downtown and choose to visit, explore, and make community connections.

So we can do you know, stronger storytelling of the businesses, but also the DDA and how we interact with them.

Um leverage our existing marketing resources, and then always refining creativity and culture microgrants.

Uh, create a more welcoming and connected downtown, so a downtown that is easy to navigate, enjoyable to experience, and increasedly connected across character areas.

So wayfinding is something that we're very interested in.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in the presentation.

Um, but you know, engaging our community with it.

Um there's while we don't have the big dollar right now to do large multimodal, um, there are small things that make big impacts.

So thinking about those and then also public realm.

And then position the DDA as our strategic partner and champion a visible, responsive, and effective DDA that leverages partnerships, resources, and advanced downtown priorities across the district.

So really continuing to enter into this leadership role.

You know, we're not the chamber, we're not the city, we're something else, and so making sure that people know who we are, um, doing this through networking or just partnerships and other um events, and then also reporting out and being transparent, and so um having programmed dashboards about what we've done today so people can understand our story and evolution over time.

Um so I'll just pause there.

Um this is a report out.

We don't need to like wordsmith anything, but um, if that sounds good, I'll kind of move over to the next section.

Looks great.

Cool.

Yeah.

Um, so this is all, you know, if this is what we want to focus on, what is the budget that can achieve these outcomes?

Um and so now I'm gonna transition into the the budget section.

Um, and happy to have this kind of be like uh ask questions along, commentary, we can make this um interactive.

Um, so we're very familiar that as a downtown development authority, we're funded through tax increment financing.

Um, we are allowed to have sales tax and property tax, a basis set, and over time as uh investment happens, any increment above that gets reinvested into the district.

Um we are very lucky that our urban renewal authority came before us, and so they were able to give us startup funding of um two million dollars.

And the way that we were able to um determine this number is looking back five years to see what were some of those core services that Laura provided and being able to budget for five years as a startup with the goal that by year five or six the DDA would be able to have some increment there to kind of balance out expenses and revenue.

Um, and so we have an administrative fee that gets ramped up from periods one through five.

Um, and the administrative fee um goes for my time, IT, being here, the attorneys, insurance, facilities, everything.

We have a parking lot program that we took over from Laura, and that includes maintenance and snow removal, small business support and district support.

This was providing a bucket of approximately like 300,000 per year to be able to do things like capital grants, marketing, farmers market holiday lights.

And so Laura assumed let's keep kind of that core services going.

And so that's what that $2 million goes towards.

So our revenue.

Right now we are projecting $259,000 for projected revenue, and that is through sales tax interest and miscellaneous revenue.

So I'm gonna just take a moment here to share the latest with this.

When we were looking at what we think property tax could be for the DDA, we were lucky that we had a 25-year data set of urban renewal and how it has grown over time.

And we also worked with our consultant during the Old Town Tomorrow action plan project to really determine what revenues could be.

And so when we developed our initial budget, we assumed that we would have a very modest amount of property tax increment grow over time.

And it actually ended up correlating the same amount of property tax increment was almost identical each year to the sales tax increment.

And so that you we could see that this growth was happening.

So the commercial assessment rate um decreased from 27% to 26 for 2026 property taxes, and is scheduled to decrease again from um in 25% in 2027.

Um so this new state legislative change with property tax affects us because we're funded through um assessment of property values.

Um so this legislation was passed.

Um it was intended to provide property tax relief in response to the rapidly increasing property values and rising property tax burdens.

I think we can all know that in 2023 we saw a big increase in property tax, which really rattled a lot of people, and so the state legislator passed this to have this um decrease in assessment rate.

Um, but a consequence for us um and entities like us is that the lower assessment rate reduces the amount of assessed values available to generate property tax revenue.

So while we assumed that we were gonna have, you know, maybe 20,000 this year, we're gonna see nothing.

Um we got our uh around this time of year, the uh county assessor's office gives the anyone that has is a taxing entity, so the city gets it, we get it, um, any sort of special district gets it.

Um it's preliminary assessments of what we think um the area is gonna generate, and our certificate said no increment.

So it was a little bit of a surprise.