By Arianna Otero, Tallahassee Democrat
The county is looking into shifting dollars from their capital improvement budget, where much of the money goes to road improvements, to go instead to affordable housing.
The request comes as the Capital Area Justice Ministry continues the fight for affordable housing, approaching the county on Tuesday asking them to step in where the city of Tallahassee and the Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency failed them.
After the swearing in of the three reelected commissioners and the reorganization of the dais, CAJM kept the county commission chambers packed as they waited for unageanded speakers to present their case to the board.
CAJM is a multi-faith advocacy group who has spoken up on several pressing issues in the capital county − such as gun violence alongside affordable housing − even putting both city and county elected officials in the hot seat to determine their position on the matters.
Their request for the county was the same as they had asked both the city and Blueprint: to ask county staff to bring back an agenda item looking at the possibility of establishing and financing a land acquisition and lease buyback program modeled off of one in Pinellas County that incentivizes affordable rental housing developers to set aside more units for low-income families.
CAJM says city and Blueprint closed the door on them
The Rev. Latricia Scriven of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church serves as the co-president of the organization and was one of a handful of speakers to ask the commission.
She shared that the reason the group approached the county? They have tried everywhere else.
“CAJM sought unsuccessfully to convince the city commission to allocate $5 million a year for a financial incentive program that would generate about 120 new units a year for families with (extremely low or no) income,” Scriven said.
In June 2023, at the same meeting where the city voted to increase their property tax rate, the group approached the commission about this plan.
“Mayor Dailey asked us instead to pursue funding through Blueprint 2020, and as you can recall, that effort also failed,” Scriven said.
At the beginning of the year and the tail end of last year CAJM approached Blueprint to see if funding from the agency could go towards affordable housing. Despite their attempt, in May, they failed to get enough support for a substantial amendment to Blueprint’s list of voter-approved projects. Scriven claimed that the failure was due to the lack of support by the majority of city commissioners.
While affordable housing as been a main priority for the group, their quest was seemingly reinvigorated following reporting by the Tallahassee Democrat which shared that over 1,000 students within the Leon County School District were homeless. Since then they have made sure to bring up this point not only at Tuesday’s meeting but at their annual Nehemiah Action Meeting.
County torn on funding affordable housing but losing road improvements
Leon County Commissioner David O’Keefe originally motioned for county staff to collaborate with CAJM to bring back an agenda item “with a proposal and implementation plan amending our five year capitol improvement budget to set aside 20% of the county’s annual surcharge revenue beginning in 2026 for the duration of Blueprint 2020,” in order to meet the ask of CAJM.
County Administrator Vince Long suggested that the commissioners take a look at the idea to better understand how implementation would work before committing any money. From there, O’Keefe fixed his motion to solely focus on the agenda item and by removing the implementation plan.
County Commissioner Nick Maddox expressed his appreciation for CAJM and their efforts in the fight for affordable housing but he shared his hesitation.
When the agenda item comes back, “I’m not sure I can go to 20% fully, I can maybe go to 10% if we get there,” Maddox said, before breaking to ask the county administrator how much money within the five-year plan they already have programmed.
Long couldn’t give a definitive number.
“It was asked that you commit funding, this would first require you to uncommit funding,” Long said.
“Just as much as we have to dig down deep and try to find that funding and do the hard work there, I’m asking that our partners in the community do the same,” Maddox said.
Commissioner Christian Caban shared his concern of taking money from one pool and passing it to another, he offered some other ideas to tackle affordable housing.
“What I would like to see … is an incentive program for developers to come in and build affordable housing in our community. We have vacant land across Leon County that’s generating little to no property taxes … why don’t we look at giving developers a rebate or a tax break if they built properties with x amount of affordable housing?” Caban said.
He explained the county would come up with a formula, based on the number of affordable housing units, to give developers a break on their property taxes for a certain amount of years. And commissioners voted unanimously to bring back the agenda item alone.
View the original story here.
