MORGANTOWN — Morgantown City Council will meet in special session Tuesday evening to consider moving forward with the city’s sixth Tax Increment Finance, or TIF, district.
Council is expected to set a public hearing to be included as part of its Nov. 4 regular meeting agenda in order to receive feedback regarding the creation of the East End Village Redevelopment District No. 6.
As the name suggests, the district would encompass the roughly 10 acres of land situated along Richwood Avenue identified, purchased and cleared for redevelopment by the Monongalia County Development Authority with assistance from the city of Morgantown, Monongalia County and other stakeholders.
The creation of a TIF district is a development tool that locks base assessed property values in place for the life of the district – presumably 30 years.
As improvements take place, taxes are collected on the rising value of the property. However, only the base value is divided among the taxing bodies as usual. The rest of the tax collected goes into a fund to pay off bonds sold to finance the district’s development.
TIF dollars are used specifically to build infrastructure improvements – water, sewer, roads, etc. – which makes the site more attractive for development, further increasing property values.
“The TIF is a critical part of the ability to develop the East End Village because of the age of infrastructure and the additional work, road work and whatnot that needs to be done,” Morgantown Area Partnership President and CEO Russ Rogerson said. “The public investment portion of that project is very important to, well, any development here and around our area as well as our state.”
The vision for East End Village is to turn a hillside of old houses rented by the bedroom to college students into an array of modern, market-rate housing options sitting over retail suites and interspersed with standalone components like a grocery store, a boutique hotel and other offerings.
Rogerson said getting the TIF district approved by the West Virginia Department of Economic Development is critical to attracting investors to that vision.
“It’s very difficult to do any kind of land contract without the TIF in place because that impacts the cost of development and therefore impacts the price of any particular lot that you want to sell for a structure,” he said. “If you have a project and you say, well, if you’re going to build a project of X number of dollars, that’ll generate X amount of bonding capacity and we could do these infrastructure changes in order to accommodate the development, then everybody is more successful.”
The Monongalia County Development Authority purchased the acreage on the doorstep of downtown Morgantown for $11.8 million in 2020.
Dave Biafora/Biafora Holdings and team, including Omni Associates-Architects, is the master developer on the project.
The city currently has five TIF districts in place, including the Riverfront, Square at Falling Run, Sunnyside, Wiley-Spruce-Brockway and Upper Falling Run TIFs.
