Good morning.

Welcome to today's meeting of the Rules and Economic Development Committee.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum consisting of Vice Chair Faulkner, Councilmember Alvarez, and myself.

Also here with us as committee staff, including Priscilla Degard from the Office of the City Attorney, Jeff Kawar from the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, Nika Bukolova, Committee Consultant, and Nicole Capritz, our representative from the mayor's office.

Thank you all for being here.

We will begin with non-agenda public comment.

There is, for the record, there is no non-agenda public comment.

And there is no comment on regulatory streamlining, open government, and economic development.

Are there any comments from the committee?

Seeing none, are there any comments from the IVA, City Attorney, or Mayor's Office.

Very.

There are no corrections or modifications.

Minutes are deemed approved.

Our moving to the action discussion agenda, we have item one report from Civic San Diego regarding the new market tax credit program.

Special welcome to Civic San Diego President Jeff Graham and Associate Project Manager Daniel Reeves, who will provide us with a report on the latest developments related to New Market Tax Credit Credits.

And thank you for joining us.

And the floor is yours.

Well, good morning.

I'm Jeff Graham, President of Civic San Diego, and I'm joined to my right this morning by Daniel Reeves, Associate Project Manager at Civic, and also responsible for managing our New Market Tax Credit program.

Pleasure to be here this morning to give you an update on the status of our program.

This is the first of uh many new programs that Civic San Diego is exploring and will be presenting to you, hopefully in the near not too distant future uh to continue the city's economic development and neighborhood revitalization programs throughout the city.

One uh important thing to note, uh, as you'll see in Mr.

Reeves' presentation is that uh we applied for New Market tax credits in 2012.

We were awarded $35 million by the U.S.

Treasury Department in April of this year.

Umfortunately, none of the six pipeline projects that were on our application last year were ready to close funding.

Um they either received funding from other sources, uh they didn't receive their entitlements in time or a variety of other reasons.

So we quickly needed to scramble to identify other qualified projects that were deserving in low-income communities uh in which to invest.

So we did identify a new project as Mr.

Reeves will present to you, the Copley Price YMCA in City Heights.

Um this was a well-deserving project.

Um we did close the transaction in record time, 39 days to close this transaction.

It was the fastest transaction that U.S.

bank ever closed, as well as our new market tax credit advisor.

Um I am going to give major kudos to Mr.

Reeves.

There were many, many uh emails at 2-3 in the morning over Friday and Saturday nights with our East Coast legal counsel and our uh Portland uh financial advisor uh to close this deal.

So we're thrilled that um our staff was able to work so hard and um accomplish this.

Um the key again was that uh we were able to close this transaction in time for filing our application this year, which we did last week, and uh I'll turn it over to Mr.

Reeves to uh give you an update on our program.

Good morning.

Thanks, Jeff.

Uh Daniel Reeves, associate project manager for Civic San Diego.

I'll be running through this presentation uh regarding our tax credit program.

By way of brief background, the New Market Tax Credit Program was enacted as part of the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act.

So it's been around for roughly 12 years, and it's administered by the United States Department of Treasury.

And the program essentially creates a tax credit.

CDEs such as Civic San Diego apply for these tax credits, and as Mr.

Graham mentioned, it's uh it's highly competitive.

When they're successful, they're able to sell these tax credits to large financial institutions, and in exchange for the tax credits, those institutions provide an investment in the CDE, uh, which is then used to provide loans to low-income businesses, or I'm sorry, businesses and low-income communities.

These businesses could be any variety of of types of businesses as long as they serve the low-income communities or low-income persons, anything from pharmacies, charter schools, manufacturing facilities, et cetera.

And the investment is made in the form of a loan, which is provided at a very low interest rate over seven years, and at the end of that seven-year period, the loan is typically forgiven.

The program has intended benefits to communities.

There's a long list of benefits that are uh are eligible.

However, Civic San Diego is focusing on some specific benefits such as job creation, the creation of high quality, high-paying jobs for low-income persons, the provision of goods or services to uh low-income communities, specifically goods or services that are not currently available in those communities.

The first transaction that we have closed was the Copley Price YMCA we closed on September 12th.

Uh it's a 53,000 square foot YMCA facility in City Heights at the corner of Elkahoe and Boulevard and Fairmount Avenue.

And it features many, many great uh community uh facilities for low and the low-income community of City Heights, such as child care classrooms, swimming pools, uh gymnasium, et cetera.

The groundbreaking is scheduled for October 8th, and uh it's anticipated that the construction will wrap up around the end of next year.

As Mr.