The purpose of this Mayor and Council Communication (M&C) is to adopt an ordinance to make minor corrections to the ordinance that created the Project Financing Zone (PFZ) in October 2013 (M&C G-18048; Ordinance 21011-10-2013).
Section 351.1015 of the Texas Tax Code allows a city that meets certain requirements to designate a project financing zone around a "Qualified Project" that complies with specified criteria. Once such a zone is designated and the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts (Comptroller) is notified, the Comptroller begins to set aside incremental growth in hotel-associated revenue (primarily state tax revenue) from all hotels within the zone for use on a qualified project by the designating city. A zone expires no later than the 30th anniversary of the date of designation.
When the Comptroller is notified that a qualfied project has been commenced, that incremental hotel-associated revenue is paid out to the designating city for use to acquire, lease, construct, improve, enlarge, and equip qualified projects and/or as security for and payment of bonds or other obligations issued or incurred for those purposes.
Fort Worth meets the requirements of Section 351.1015, and both the Fort Worth Convention Center and the multipurpose Dickies Arena that is being built adjacent to the Will Rogers Memorial Center meet the definition of qualified project. In October of 2013, the Fort Worth City Council adopted an ordinance designating the PFZ around those two qualified projects, with that ordinance containing longitude and latitude coordinates for the centers of the projects and setting boundary lines.
In checking recently to determine whether a planned hotel would fall within the PFZ, staff discovered that the boundary lines shown in the ordinance were not centered around the coordinates but instead appeared to use the qualified projects’ street addresses as centerpoints. As a result, the boundary lines shown in the attachment to the ordinance were slightly askew - generally slightly to the north and west of where they should have been. The attached "Comparison" pdf shows the differences in the two sets of boundaries. While the boundary issue was being reviewed, it was also discovered that, although the coordinates for the qualified project contained in the ordinance are correct, the labels for the two sites were reversed.
The PFZ will not expire until the 30th anniversary of its designation. Given the zone's long duration it is especially important to have a complete and accurate public record about it. Therefore, staff is recommending that the City Council adopt the attached ordinance, which corrects the mislabelling and replaces the prior exhibit with one that shows the correct boundaries of the PFZ.
Adoption of this correction ordinance will not have any immediate impact because no hotels currently exist in the areas that are being added to the east and the south and all of the hotels located within the prior boundary lines are also substantially located within the corrected boundaries.
A Form 1295 is not required for this contract because: This M&C does not request approval of a contract with a business entity. |
