St. Cloud Mayor Advocates Flexibility in TIF for Downtown Housing Boost

(KNSI) – St. Cloud’s top elected official testified to Minnesota lawmakers to support a change that could help bring more market rate housing to downtown.

Mayor Dave Kleis was in St. Paul on Wednesday to ask a legislative committee to make Tax Increment Financing more flexible. As it stands now, TIF is mainly used to improve blighted property. Klies explained what they hope to change. “It’s basically creating the utilization of TIF without having to have a certain percent of affordable housing. This is just more housing in general at all levels, but predominantly workforce housing, market-rate housing.”

The change would let St. Cloud take advantage of underutilized city-owned surface parking lots. Kleis says that would open the door for housing and retail and add additional ramp parking to go downtown. “You take a piece of property that’s not paying any taxes now, build market-rate housing on it. Now that whole structure is paying tax, which can also go into the overall infrastructure of downtown. So it benefits not only downtown, but all of the community, and especially the adjacent area.”

He says the money collected from a TIF district would help cover the infrastructure cost for new buildings. Once the infrastructure is paid for, property taxes will go to the general fund. It is part of the city’s plans to bring 1,000 housing units downtown.

The Minnesota Legislature ends on May 20th.

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