City Council Meeting

Amy Ergasstafffiscal year. When we say housing trust fund we're talking about the the funding that was committed by developers prior to the adoption of the affordable dwelling unit ordinance in 2020. A housing trust fund usually implies that it's a reoccurring resource, but that's the terminology that we use for simplicity. There is a balance of 542,524. I understand there have been questions in the past about where this has come from. So this chart below just gives that transparency. There's the date alongside the project name, the purpose that was outlined in the and then the balance off on the right-hand side. This also includes a debit or an expense, the funding that was utilized for the Beacon Landing project.

I mean, I think the Beacon Landing project used LIHTC credits. I think Westwood had LIHTC credits, but that's a long time ago. And that was a very unique

Catherine Readthank you I will echo that this this has been a long time coming and just just to back up and give some history about the housing trust fund it was cash in lieu is sort of the real estate term because we didn't have a set-aside policy didn't that required developments like Mount Vineyard or the Enclave to build affordable housing set-asides. And so they gave us cash in lieu of building those, which is how we ended up with money in the bucket. And so when Beacon Landing came to us looking for investment by the city, which was necessary for their financing appeal, they had 23 separate sources of financing for Beacon Landing, it was necessary for this city because it's in our city it was necessary for our city to invest

so they could get the rest of the financing and i just want to be clear on that because people don't go through life understanding how these things work for many people the complaint was there was no application process which was the whole genesis of creating these guidelines in an application process why should beacon landing get it instead of somebody else getting it and it was a unique process but the money had also been sitting there for i think seven years and the whole point of the cash in lieu was instead of providing affordable housing units they were giving us money so we could use it to provide affordable housing units so that 700 000 investment got us 54 of those units which comes back to what you were saying as far as evaluating

to replenish our bucket is beside the point. need to be focused on how best do we spend the 500 000 and how do we let people who have projects in our city know that this money is available because just for beacon landing that money was so critical for them to actually build that and the impact has been so great will be so great for our city and i i think a lot of this is how we think about it it's not the amount it's how we invest the amount and figure out how we can support people who are trying to build housing for people who need it. And that might be service workers and it might be people with very low AMI or people with disabilities. All kinds of people need housing in our city. So with that, I will say thank you very much.