Newark City Council unanimously approves an application for the state’s Downtown Development District program.
The program intends to spur capital investment in commercial business districts and neighborhoods in downtown areas.
Newark hopes the program can help spark affordable housing development, construction of smaller commercial units, and new retail, entertainment, medical and office spaces, while also renovating historic structures and filling commercial space vacant longer than six months.
And Newark’s Planning Director Renee Bensley says they hope to capitalize on the program’s incentives in a different way.
"What we are looking to do is create basically a sliding scale. Where the more policy goals you hit, the more of the incentives you would be eligible for from the city for the Downtown Development District. This would be a novel application in that none of the other Downtown Development Districts really have it in this way," said Bensley.
If projects meet those policy objectives, they would get incentives like the waiving of special use permit fees, utility deposit rebate scaled to size of commercial use and expedited plan and permit review among other incentives.
Newark’s acreage for the proposed district is only 131 acres, but Bensley says that’s strategic.
"We did not maximize our current application limit, which would have been 275 acres for a few reasons. One, it's been recommended by the Office of State Planning Coordination, that for the applications that have been most successful have had a focus or a very focused area that they're concentrating on," said Bensley.
Bensley adds since the city would be able to update the boundaries of the district once a year, it gives them room to grow and react based on economic development in the process.
Applications for the Downtown Development District program are due June 15 with a presentation to the state later in the summer. It's expected the governor will select three towns to add to the program by the end of the year.
