City officials, along with the Citizen Advisory Committee for the South St. Petersburg Community Redevelopment Area (CRA), will host the first annual CRA Summer Summit at the Enoch Davis Center Auditorium, 1111 18th Ave. S., on Tuesday, June 19. The meeting begins at 4:30 p.m. and will continue until public comment is finished. The public is invited to attend…
MARIANNA, Fla. – Counties from Escambia, to Jefferson, and everything in between, have vacant properties that just aren’t helping economic development. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection hosts an annual program that teaches county officials ways to help redevelop the properties. Often times, gas stations, laundromats, landfills and other old properties will be left vacant for years,…
The city of Port St. Joe will seek to extend the term of its redevelopment agency, though the Board of County Commissioners has expressed its dissent. The Port St. Joe Redevelopment Agency, followed by the City Commission (all five commissioners sit on the PSJRA board with two at-large members) has approved moving ahead with extending…
One of the big questions in urbanism is the degree to which culture shapes economic development. Traditionally, it was thought that culture follows from economic development: The more developed and affluent that a city becomes, the more money that it has to spend creating art galleries, museums, concert halls, and other cultural venues. But my own writing…
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn remembers how underutilized, underappreciated, and unattractive the city’s waterfront was when he first arrived in 1987. The blocks of offices and surface parking lots located downtown, near the confluence of the Hillsborough River and the bay, provided few reasons to come downtown beyond work. “The city had turned its back on…
Nine groups are competing for up to $3 million in arts funding from the Tallahassee Community Redevelopment Agency. “The nine eligible applications will now be reviewed for compliance with Phase One criteria,” CRA Executive Director Roxanne Manning said. That criteria requires that the project be located within one of the two CRA districts and be…
The Live Oak Community Redevelopment Agency rejected the bids on the project at Tuesday’s meeting, which would have added landscaping and bulb outs to the Court Street corridor in downtown. The low bid received was $83,774.06, which was more than $30,000 above the amount the board had budgeted for the project. The board had previously…