| Mr. Anzek said that the previous night, he and Mr. Breuckman provided |
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| City Council a presentation about where the State was going, under |
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| Governor Snyder, with incentives to attract business development with |
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| historic preservation and brownfield development. The Planning |
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| Department was responsible for those elements, and they had been |
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| tracking it closely at the State level. They were starting to see some ideas |
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| firm. The Snyder administration put $100 million toward the initiatives. |
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| There was $50 million for business development and $25 million each for |
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| historic preservation and brownfield development efforts. There were |
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| about 20 different criteria within the law that had to be met - most of them - |
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| to qualify for grants or loans. Mr. Breuckman then showed a power point. |
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| Mr. Breuckman stated that last year, there were a series of five public acts |
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| passed toward the end of the year. Those replaced the old MEGA and |
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| brownfield and historic tax credits. Those happened under the old |
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| Michigan Business Tax, which had been Governor Snyder’s priority to |
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| eliminate. When the Business Tax went away, the tax credits ceased to |
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| have any meaning. Last year, the administration came up with successor |
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| programs, and created two umbrella programs - one was the Business |
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| Development Program, which was about funding job creation activities |
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| and was fairly similar to how the MEGA program worked. It changed |
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| some of the formulas within the law, but did not impact what the Planning |
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| Commission did much. There was now a Community Revitalization |
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| Program, which were brownfield and historic tax credit replacements. |
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| There was a $10 million cap for loans per project and $1 million for |
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| grants. He explained that eligible investment was for demolition, |
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| construction or rehabilitation of buildings, site improvements, machinery, |
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| fixture and equipment. Some soft costs could be covered as an |
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| investment, such as architecture, engineering, title work and legal. The |
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| criteria to access the money under the Community Revitalization |
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| Program included that something would increase density, promote |
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| mixed-use and walkable communities and promote sustainable |
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| development. Those were things they had not seen before in State |
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| economic development incentives. It tied back to one of Governor |
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| Snyder’s other signature initiatives, which he was pursuing with a lot more |
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| vigor than State government had pursued in the past. Governor |
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| Granholm started the “Cool Cities” initiative, but Governor Snyder had |
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| really taken the placemaking issue as a guiding philosophy. It was a new |
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| policy that coordinated almost any State agency that touched physical |
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| development. There was a real focus on downtowns and commercial |
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| cores. One criterion that was initially adopted by the Michigan Strategic |
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| Fund about a year ago stated that a project must be in a downtown or |
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| commercial core. The State law softened that a bit for communities such |
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| as Rochester Hills. On the placemaking front, the State launched the |
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