Okay, we'll go ahead and call the uh June fifteenth, twenty twenty six City Council meeting to order.

We have six council members in chambers and uh councilman stone is excused.

We'll go ahead and move to our next item, which is the pledge of allegiance for all of those that want to participate, please stand if you're able

to

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

Do

we have a late for which is stand?

I mean, I've got individual liberty and

thank you.

We don't have any proclamations tonight.

Uh

so we'll move into our consent calendar.

What are council's wishes?

Move to approve.

I'll second.

Okay, have a motion and a second to approve the consent calendar is published.

Do we have any further discussion?

Rachel, roll call vote.

Frank Hawkins.

Yes.

Jason Brown.

Yes.

Jerry Palmer.

Yes.

Ruth Pierce,

yes,

and Chris Reed.

Yes.

Okay, motion passes six to zero.

That moves us into our items of consideration.

I would like to to move a couple of the agenda items around.

So I'm going to have a presentation on Opportunity Zone Number Two, which is item B.

Uh, and Sean Barriger is going to give that presentation.

Thank you, Mayor.

Excuse me.

The federal opportunity zone program was established back in twenty seventeen to encourage long-term private investment in economically distressed communities across the nation.

Idaho originally received twenty-eight opportunity zone designations, including downtown Twin Falls.

Can you flip the screen for me, please?

So it's the red area on this map in front of you.

It's basically the town site, the original town site, which is a its own census tract.

And it is being referred to as Opportunity Zone 2.0.

So as part of that process, uh, states need to nominate a new set of opportunity zones for designation by the U.S.

Treasury, and that will begin January 1st of twenty twenty-seven.

Idaho has approximately eighty census tracks across the state that meet the eligibility requirements.

However, the governor is only going to be able to submit twenty-five zones or census tracts for consideration in the new OZ 2.0.

So there are four eligible census tracks within the city of Twin Falls, and that's what you see on the map here.

So you have the red one, which is the original town site area.

That blue one above it is basically Washington to Blue Lakes and Addison to Pole Line.

So that includes the President Streets, some commercial corridors on Falls, the College, and then commercial corridors on Pole Line Road on the south side of Pole Line Road.

The brown one to the right includes uh areas near Harmon Park, some of the Kimberley Road frontage, and then the old chamber industrial park area, and then some of the area out uh north of Amalgamated Sugar into Hankins Road.

And then the one uh to the south there is primarily residential area or

um

currently agricultural produced property, but likely for residential development.

So I went through and pulled data on all of these areas, evaluated,

um

so the goal is to um improve uh poverty levels and improve household incomes with these investments that occur in these areas.

So tracking that information against each other in these in these various areas, other tools that we might have that could be layered incentives to encourage development, the availability of property to develop um, and uh previous successes.

The downtown census tract really rises to the top of this.

Um it has some of the higher poverty rates, some of the lower household incomes compared to other areas, as you know, between the urban renewal agency and the city, about half of that area is under a new urban renewal area.

So there are opportunities for incentives there.