BRUNSWICK
The Brunswick Town Council in two separate 8- 1 votes Monday approved outlines of two tax increment financing ( TIF) districts on property at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station.
The approval of geographic boundaries, which meets a March 1 deadline, is the first step toward completing a plan that would shelter new property value on the former naval base property from formulas that determine state aid to the town’s school and municipal coffers.
District 4 Town Councilor John Perreault cast the lone dissenting vote on both proposals, citing his desire for more information.
According to Town Manager Gary Brown, approximately $12 million in new property value would be added to Brunswick’s overall valuation by April 1 if tax increment financing districts on both the Brunswick Executive Airport and Brunswick Landing property are not approved.
That increased value would not affect state aid to Brunswick immediately, Brown said, but it would factor into state formulas in two years.
“The school department is grossly affected by the state formula already,” District 1 Councilor David Watson said Monday.
On Thursday, the Maine Department of Education released preliminary school funding numbers that show Brunswick in line for a $1.24 million cut in state aid for the 2012-13 budget. The valuation of property within the town is one of two primary factors considered in the formula that determines state aid for education.
Brown said that the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development, which needs to sign off on the locally crafted TIF proposal, gave an informal nod to a timeline involving the determination of geographic boundaries for the districts by March — with details on how the new property taxes would be split by the town and the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority (MRRA), which oversees civilian redevelopment of the former Navy base, to be determined sometime during the summer.
In January, MRRA Executive Director Steve Levesque told The Times Record that original TIF proposals on the property would shelter upward of $40 million at Brunswick Landing over 20 to 30 years.
With those funds, Levesque said, MRRA might upgrade and maintain utility systems and roads, make infrastructure enhancements or building improvements.
In a November memo to the Town Council, Brown outlined a rough plan for each TIF district.
For the Brunswick Executive Airport TIF district, Brown wrote, MRRA would receive 100 percent of revenue generated from new valuation on land serving aeronautical uses for the first 20 years.
For the Brunswick Landing TIF district, Brown wrote that the term of the TIF would be 30 years and that there are various options for how to split the new tax revenues between the town and MRRA. Those options include a clear 50-50 split, a percentage split that changes over time, or a performance-based formula that would allocate more to MRRA based on the number of jobs created at Brunswick Landing and the airport.
Brown said that designation of the tax increment financing districts in two separate geographic areas meets a state limit on size for TIF districts, set at 2 percent of the town’s entire acreage.
The 575-acre TIF district approved Monday for the property at Brunswick Landing comes in at approximately 2 percent of the town’s total 28,800 acres, according to documents outlining the statutory requirements and thresholds for the proposed TIF districts.
Should that district and the proposed 154.2-acre TIF district proposed at Brunswick Executive Airport receive ultimate approval from the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, that would put 2.9 percent of the town’s total acreage in a TIF district.
The state also limits total acreage that can be included in a TIF district to 5 percent of the town’s total acreage.
The town’s other new TIF district is located downtown, encompassing the Brunswick Station development.
No housing TIF
Brown said Monday that separate talks about affordable housing TIF districts around former Navy housing units now owned by developer George Schott’s company, Affordable Midcoast Housing, have ended.
“It’s not going to happen,” Brown said Monday.
Brown said that state restrictions for using sheltered property tax revenue from such a TIF would not benefit schools as originally thought. To use those revenues for school spending, Brown said, the town would need to prove that the new development would have an impact on the school budget, which Brown said the town could not prove.
dfishell@timesrecord.com
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