Committee to order.

Welcome, please.

Councilmember Bowie.

Council President Acre.

Here.

Councilmember Jost.

Here.

Councilmember Coleman.

Here.

Councilmember Kim.

Here.

Councilmember Yang.

Here.

Councilmember Johnson.

Seeing five present, two absent.

Great.

Good morning, everyone.

Um, we have two items on our agenda today.

Looking forward to both of them.

Um, the first one is a topic that has come up um many times, both recently in our council agendas, and also I will say in my tenure on the city council.

This has been like a topic that we have wrestled with many times.

Um, and the question relates to how we calculate um assessments when we do um infrastructure work, specifically often street maintenance work.

Um, and specifically the question has come up how we calculate the special benefit um for adjacent property owners to determine how much we can charge to adjacent property owners.

Um, I think this is going to be a really helpful and informative conversation for us.

I'm really grateful to the department for offering to bring in the third-party consultant we use to do those assessments.

Um, and my hope also is that this footage of today provides helpful evergreen information that we can share with our constituents.

We can share this link to say, hey, this is how this works.

This is the conversation we had about it.

So this is hopefully going to be important for today, and also um going forward.

So with that, there are a ton of people here to talk about this, and I'm not exactly sure all of their names.

So I'm gonna invite everybody who's here for agenda item one, some people's names I know, to come on up.

Including Bruce and Lynn and anybody else with you.

Yes.

Welcome.

Mr.

Engelbert.

Thank you, Council President, Council members.

We do have other folks, but mainly John Barclay, who is from Hosh Appraisal, who will be talking a little bit later.

The rest of us, I think we'll we'll just maybe wait in the wings unless there are some specific questions of other people.

So there is a PowerPoint.

I think you are probably aware of it, have a camera.

So I'll just walk you through that.

My name is Bruce Engelbrecht.

I'm the manager of the real estate section of the finance department.

Finance assessments is in finance, but it used to be part of real estate, and then a couple years ago I'd shifted over into uh finance treasury.

And so I had a lot to do with uh the assessments in the past and in the creation of the policies a couple of years ago, and so I'm kind of doing uh much of the conversation here.

Okay, on the presentation agenda, um, we want to give you just a little bit of background on assessments.

Hopefully, I can breeze through that pretty quickly.

Uh the cities uh then that led up to our response to the various lawsuits and challenges that we had, and so um when we get into that part of it, that's when John will speak primarily, and then I'll kind of wrap up that part of it.

Then we wanted to take this opportunity toward the end to um to tee up a couple of policy amendments that we'd like to make to the special assessment policies.

Um we we have already had um uh the mayor's office sort of review and understand what we're trying to propose, and they've expressed uh uh assistant mayor uh stuma langer has expressed full support from the mayor's office for what we're gonna suggest to you here today.

Okay, and then there will be time at the end for um questions, but certainly if you have questions as we go along, uh every time I'm sure you're not shy.

Okay, uh a little bit on assessment theory and then a little bit of history, and then we'll get into John's part.

Um special assessment, just a definition.

It's a charge that we put on property to help pay for a public improvement like a street improvement or or a mill and overlay.

Um the federal highway administration uses this definition of tax on land and buildings deriving direct benefits because of the transportation improvement.

Um I did a paper for the university here, um, the Humphrey School not long ago, and so I had to dig back into history just a bit, and I I um saw that it goes back to the 1600s in Europe, and then it came over to this country in in the 1600s and to New York initially, and then um and then uh it spread across the country by the late 1800s, and it was all um to try to recoup some of the cost of um of you know expanding streets or creating new streets through through private property.

Uh a couple of key concepts.

One is value capture, and then the other is special benefit.

Um, value capture is what I've come to understand is a term that is used more nowadays where uh people who research, like my advisor that you do a lot of research on how we can recoup some of the cost of public transportation projects.