Well, good morning, everyone.

Let's go ahead and start our study session.

Hope everybody's having a great morning visiting and we call it networking this morning.

Welcome to our Mesa City Council study session for January 15th, 2026.

All council members are present.

With that, we're going to start with item one.

A is a presentation on proposed programs and funding options to support redevelopment priorities and initiatives.

That's going to be by Jeff and Jeff.

Okay.

Angelica and Jay and Nana as needed.

We got a challenge.

Probably Jeff, you're starting it out.

McVay or Robin.

Yes, sir.

Mayor.

Mayor, Council, good morning.

Jeff McVay, manager of urban transformation.

For the past two years, uh Council has identified redevelopment as a key strategic priority of the city.

During that time, uh the core team that's represented here today, led by Mr.

Robbins and supported with by by Nana and Jay and their teams.

Um I want to specifically recognize Amanda Elliott, Rachel Phillips, and Mazincox for the for the hard work that they do to support us in this effort.

Um but we have been working diligently for the past couple of years and are pleased to be able to come to you and present a preliminary recommendations for a redevelopment toolkit.

That not only have we been working with this core team and and uh and the staff supporting us, but this has been an effort that's been across the entire city.

We've worked with almost every department in the city because the redevelopment crosses every boundary that we work with.

Well, we before we get into the to the actual redevelopment program, um we we kind of want to remind the council and set the stage.

We say it often, but uh we live we live and work in an regulatory environment that provides a limited I heard my name.

That provides limited um economic development and redevelopment tools that are available.

So what we've done over the course of the past year is we've we've gone and we've looked at best practices across the state, across the nation, and we threw all these ideas into a hopper.

Go ahead and to the next one.

Um as we presented back in in June 2025, we we gave you a sense of the framework in which we were gonna look.

So with all those tools into the hopper, we we then um started looking at the potential tools.

We um took created a short list based off of what are feasible, what meets our city's unique needs, and and which will have we believe the greatest impact for uh affecting the redevelopment.

Once we had that short list, then we put it into uh the next layer of of review and we started building them out.

Umine design terms, we built them out to a 30% um level.

Um that gave us the ability to review them against legal and and budgetary considerations.

So that what we're gonna present today, we feel very confident that with council's direction to move forward that we can take these to the to the full development and be able to come back to council with with fully baked toolkits that are budgetarily and legally realistic to implement in the city.

Um, but before we go on to present our neck our actual recommendations on the redevelopment programs, we do want to talk a little bit about why.

What is the reason why we think redevelopment and creating this program is important?

Mr.

Robinson.

Yeah, uh Mayor Council, it's great to be with you today.

Um we have looked across the United States and and looked at many of the case studies, and we have a lot of history to look back on of the rise and fall of some of the great cities.

And when we examine those case studies, there are clear patterns that stand out about why um, whether it's an entire city or part of the city um goes into decline and why it is revitalized.

And um, one thing that we often see in these case studies is that there's an economic shock that happens, an industry moves out, or sometimes it's just steady, slow decline without any type of intervention and without any type of intervention, um, it will slowly slip into a state of what we call disinvestment.

And we use the term sometimes slum and blight to talk about disinvestment.

Um you can think of those as being synonymous terms, but um slum and blight is when we have um a condition where deteriorated or underperforming properties properties negatively affect um safety, health, quality of life, and the economic vitality of an area.

And the problem is is that when communities start slipping into this stage, it creates a negative reinforcing cycle that just gets worse and worse until there's an intervention, and that's what we're here to talk with you about today.

Whether it's from the private sector, the public sector, or often a combination of the two, cities can make tactical interventions to mitigate the decline of communities, and then to make interventions to pull communities out of deep disinvestment.

Another thing that we see in the national case studies when cities don't engage is that they are accepting a cost, but they're accepting it in a different place.

So we see that distressed properties they create an impact on the public finances.

We see that through code compliance, legal processes, these are hearings, liens, inspections, all of that takes staff time.

This can also be seen, especially with vacant properties where we have a higher calls for fire for police service, and then directly there is an impact to the tax base in lower assessed values, lost sales tax revenues, taxes that are delinquent, and generally that area then becomes harder to market.

We'll say this maybe a few times in the presentation, but when we look at decline and disinvestment, it doesn't stay in a neat little box.

It tends to spread.

To date, our costs exceed over $30,000, and we anticipate this is going to continue to be an ongoing expense for the city.

And so we continue to have that public financial burden even on this property where we have a property owner who indicates a willingness to fix it and reopen it, but um they've been in the permit process for over two years, and it's not for a lack of staff not trying to work with them.

They file an application and then they just don't proceed with a resubmital and complete to complete their permit approvals.

Um so this is a challenging property for us.

Mayor question.

Mr.