NRP fund move in question

by Dennis Geisinger

Today through Thursday the Standish-Ericsson Neighborhood Association will gather votes from its residents about moving $25,000 of unused Neighborhood Revitalization Project funds that had been set aside for area home improvement loans into its general operations budget. The SENA board says it needs the money to provide operating funds for the association through February 2008.
SENA is one among a few dozen city neighborhood associations whose funding has dried up because, as NRP team leader for SENA, Joe Horan, said in an interview last week, “The reality has been that revenues and projections do not equal expenditures.”

Since the NRP depends on city tax increment revenues, funding projections have been hit hard by slowing growth in property values and changes to the state tax system implemented by Jesse Ventura and the state legislature in 2001.
According the NRP Director Bob Miller, “The 2007 projections for revenues is $19,072,476 less than the projections made in 2004 that were used by NRP for allocations to neighborhoods.”

Formed by the passage of state and city laws almost 20 years ago, the NRP “was created at a time of heightened concern about the perception of neighborhood decline and the loss of the middle class in Minneapolis,” according to documents available from the City of Minneapolis.

“If unabated, these trends mean Minneapolis will crash and burn as a decent livable city over the next 20 years,” said Executive Director of the Minneapolis Community Development Agency James Heltzer, in 1989. “There must be an interdisciplinary team approach to implement neighborhood revitalization plans designed through careful consideration and planning by each neighborhood in workshops,” Heltzer said.

To date, the City Council has approved the use of almost $275 million of NRP funds.

“I look around at some of the physical improvements made through the NRP and I’m really impressed,” said City Council Member Sandy Colvin-Roy (DFL- Ward 12) last week. But the City Council has also been responsible for using money from the city’s Common Project, an account set up to fund local redevelopment, to repay debts for other unrelated bills—like City pensions.

In Colvin-Roy’s words, “We’ve been forced by economic conditions to shift some of the funding that had been set aside for city revitalization.”

Consequently, NRP’s Bob Miller contacted city neighborhood associations in September to say that, “Nothing that I have written to you in the past 15 years is as important as what is in this letter.”

“The numbers are bleak,” Miller told neighborhood leaders, “but they must be taken for what they are, i.e., projections made on the basis of a number of assumptions. Local decisions, among other things, can greatly alter future revenues.”

One of those decisions—whether or not to fund NRP at 70 percent of its projected $41.8 million allocation—will be made at the next full City Council meeting on Friday. It is expected that the vote will be a favorable one for NRP. After that, according to city officials, the future of local redevelopment will likely be in the hands of the neighborhoods.

“We’re going to have to identify new funding streams for the NRP,” said City Council President Barbara Johnson (DFL-Ward 4).
“I think its important for neighborhood associations to raise money on their own,” said Council Member Colvin-Roy.

“I don’t think city understands the huge number of hours volunteered or the talent and energy extended by our residents,” said SENA coordinator Shirley Yeoman. “That’s expertise that the City’s getting that it doesn’t pay for.”