Talent residents vote down urban renewal funding plan

Earlier this month, Talent residents voted in a special election to determine whether they would fund an urban renewal plan to help rebuild the town after the 2020 Almeda Fire. Almost two-thirds of residents voted against the plan to use tax-increment financing that could have generated almost $19 million over 20 years. Darby Ayers-Flood is the mayor of Talent. She joins us to share what’s next for the town and how they might fund revitalization efforts in the future.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, in a special election in Southwestern Oregon, Talent residents voted down an urban renewal district. By a nearly two-thirds margin, voters said “no” to a plan that would have used what’s known as Tax Increment Financing. It’s money from property taxes to help the city rebuild after the deadly Almeda Fire. Darby Ayers-Flood is the mayor of Talent. She joins us now to talk about what rebuilding will look like going forward. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.

Darby Ayers-Flood: Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me back.

Miller: I want to start with a big picture especially since we just heard from the mayor of Detroit. Can you remind us what the Almeda Fire did to Talent at just almost exactly the same time?

Ayers-Flood: The Alameda Fire started just south of Talent and then within a span of just a day, ripped up the Bear Creek corridor and burned through Talent and in Phoenix and then part of unincorporated Medford. So in that fire, that day, it burned a full third of our city, about 700 homes. We lost 60% of our commercial brick and mortar. And the fire very, very uniquely, burned a great deal of our naturally occurring affordable housing, mostly through the manufactured home park. So it devastated our Latino community, our senior community, our more vulnerable populations. It just was, as I’ve said many times, a fire with intention.

Miller: Out of the devastation you’ve just described, how much has been rebuilt?

Ayers-Flood: Well like Detroit, Oregon, we’ve seen a robust recovery of single family homes. Those homes that had insurance and means of recovery came back pretty quickly. But we still lag considerably behind in our commercial revitalization. So, what that looks like is the single family homes we’ve had about 80% of the permits pulled. So it’s either rebuilt or in the progress of. But when it comes to our commercial corridor, we are seeing about 17% of those permits pulled, the last time I looked at the stats.

Miller: But what about the specific kind of residential housing that, as you noted, is sometimes called naturally occurring affordable housing, meaning places that cost less for people to live. But not because they’re subsidized by some government, but just because they happen to be cheaper. Has that kind of housing also rebounded?

Ayers-Flood: It has not, not in the same way that the single family dwellings have. And a lot of that housing was either underinsured or in some cases not insured at all. But really the thing that impacted that type of housing the most is, when those homes were purchased, often purchased in the $25,000 to $50,000 range and the replacement cost. Most insurance policies don’t pay for full replacement. The replacement cost is anywhere from $125,000 to $200,000.

So, what we’ve seen is just incredible shortfalls in insurance proceeds, making it impossible for the recovery to happen. Talent lost about 47% of its manufactured housing. And looking at that two years later, most of it has not recovered yet. So, we’re still in a pretty deep deficit of affordable housing here in Talent.

Miller: All of this is part of the background for the vote that happened just a couple of weeks ago. When people talk about urban renewal districts, it’s often associated with what used to be called urban blight. And it can be seen as something that can lead to gentrification. Can you describe the plan that was in front of voters in this recent election? My understanding is it’s a different vision of the way this kind of financing can work.

Ayers-Flood: That’s right. The statute allows for two types of building or two types of uses for urban renewals in the state of Oregon. One of them, and by far the most common use is to mitigate blights. And, in fact, Talent has had an urban renewal for that purpose for the last 30 years. And it’s been very impactful and very effective here in our community. But the other kind of lesser known use is to recover from natural disasters. So it’s not just fire. It’s also flood. It’s also earthquakes. So there’s an opportunity to use Tax Increment Financing to recover from a natural disaster. And that was how we designed this plan.

Miller: Tax increment, meaning that the difference in property taxes after it’s voted in, after you set it at some level, and all the stuff that comes in, above that, it can go to specifically defined purposes. What was this money going to be used specifically for?

Ayers-Flood: I think it’s important to clarify it because this is really a complex kind of a financing tool to use. But it’s not only just the future increments of taxes, but it’s also within a very defined district. So, in this case, we drew a district boundary around our burn scar. And so that was about 25% of our community, which also happens to be about 25% of our land mass within our city limits. And that also happens to be the area that burned. So within that district is the only place that those tax increment finances come from. So it’s not just a portion of the future taxes, but it’s only within the district and it can also only be used within the district as well.

So wherever you draw the district line is where those finances can be used. And so in our case, we drew a district around our burn scar except there was also a small piece that led to a piece of land that we could use for affordable housing and to increase our housing stock in our community. And the purpose of the plan was entirely to recover from the fire. So what we got out of the process was a plan that will stand on its own with or without this financing. It’s the Almeda Fire Recovery Revitalization Plan. So that’s one of the really great outcomes of this work that we’ve done is we’ve got a really well-defined plan for a recovery well into another decade.

There were four primary areas of focus. To recover affordable housing [because] one of the most devastating losses was affordable housing in our community and really displaced most of our most vulnerable communities. Then also to revitalize our commercial areas which we are finding, over two years later, are still just not coming back. And I understand that’s fairly common. But boy, I’ll tell you, a community without its own commercial identity can really be at risk of being absorbed by larger communities. And so it’s a real focus of ours. And then the other two areas were to upgrade our city infrastructures. As we’re recovering and rebuilding, we’re finding that new housing coming in is more dense, coming in with modern fixtures and is really having a heavy impact on our systems.

And we need to sort of catch up with that. So we’re rebuilding faster than our infrastructure can handle. And then finally, there was a large portion of the plan that was designated to increase resiliency and decrease the risk of natural disasters into the future. So one of the major challenges we had during the fire was a failing water system. So we were unable to fight the fire in our community with any effectiveness because our firefighting delivery systems failed. So there’s quite a bit of work to do in that area as well. All of those items in the plan are still gonna be worked on.

Miller: So how, is a big question, because we’re talking about funding that was about close to $19 million was going to be raised over 20 years. You say that the projects remain the same. You still want to spend money on these projects because they’re important. Where will you get that money?

Ayers-Flood: Well, that’s the million dollar question.

Miller: The $19 million question?

Ayers-Flood: The $19 million question. Very well said. You know this is the reality of the situation. Emergency responses from federal and state are really designed around response, transitional, emergency, sheltering, those kinds of things, getting the power immediately back on, getting the water immediately back on. But as recovery happens over the long term, as those kinds of resources start to wane, we’re really looking at areas of our recovery where there’ll be gaps of funding.

So it puts us kind of back in the position we were before the fire, where items that need to happen in our community we’ll look for grants in the same competitive pools that other cities look for grants. And if you’re shovel ready, you can apply. And I think the biggest impact of not having this increment financing we’ll have is, with a dedicated funding resource to pay for this plan, we could choose the order and the timing of the recovery. So what we’re discovering a couple of years later is recovery is a layered process. And you sort of have to lay down the foundation before you start erecting the other pieces of the recovery. And I think what this will do more than anything else is slow our recovery down quite a bit.

And then because our funding will be dictated by what grants are available, it’ll sort of reorder the way we recover. And I think it’s gonna be interesting. We’re gonna have to be very, very focused about how we build things or rebuild things in a way that if you don’t lay the foundation for this recovery, it can impact you later. We’re seeing that already with houses coming back at the pace that they’re coming back. It’s sort of overtaxing our infrastructure and so our inability to get in front of that is causing challenges to the way our systems work.

So, I see two big impacts happening. The timing of things and the order of the way we recover. It’s gonna be super challenging. So there might be even times where we will have to choose not to take a grant because we don’t have foundational work in place to be able to utilize a grant. That’s not happening at this moment, but I definitely see that as a possibility in our recovery. So, yeah, I think we’re in for the long haul. You know, grants pay for a lot of stuff but I think there’ll be a lot of gaps and we’ll just have to look at all of the financing tools in the box. I think the county has suggested that we look at and are taking out general bonds. Certainly that will be up for discussion. But I think we’re just going to have to look at all the different ways that we can finance this recovery because these are all priorities that have to be taken care of in order for us to recover our community.

Miller: Darby Ayers-Flood, thanks very much for joining us.

Ayers-Flood: Once again, I appreciate it.

Miller: Darby Ayers-Flood is the mayor of Talent.

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