St. Albans residents will vote on Town Meeting Day whether to approve an $11.4 million bond paid for through tax increment financing to upgrade the city’s downtown area.
$10 million of that money would be earmarked for two new four-story apartment buildings behind city hall, housing about 90 new units in total, according to city planning documents. Those units would primarily be one- and two-bedroom apartments and be considered “workforce housing” — meaning they would be affordable for people making between 80% and 120% of the area’s median income.
The median household income in the St. Albans City area is just under $50,000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The apartment buildings would fill in space between Hudson and Center streets that is either vacant or used for surface parking. Part of the nearby Bellevue building would be demolished to accommodate the new buildings, as would two city-owned buildings on Hudson Street.
Of the remaining bond money, about $1.2 million would cover construction costs and professional services for the city’s Federal Street redevelopment project. That money would supplement the nearly $8 million in federal money that St. Albans has already received to revamp Federal Street.
Additionally, $200,000 would be used to pay for brownfield remediation at 45 Kingman St., where another housing project is in the works.
If passed, the bond debt would be paid for through tax increment financing, or TIF. Under that structure, a municipality designates a TIF district — in this case downtown St. Albans — and pays for upgrades to the district with future tax revenues that are expected to be derived from those improvements.
Since the creation of its TIF district in 2012, the city has taken on about $21 million of debt to fund infrastructure projects. According to Dominic Cloud, the St. Albans city manager, the debt issuance period for the St. Albans TIF district ends this spring, making this the final vote on improvements to the district under the financing mechanism.
Cloud said that the city’s $10 million dollar TIF investment in the housing project would cover polluted brownfield site remediation, parking and other site work, “setting the table” for a private developer to construct the apartment buildings.
“The city is really the master developer,” Cloud said. “Our role is to take on and absorb the costs that would prevent this from being done.” The remainder of the housing project will likely require about $25 million in additional funding from a private developer, which the city has not officially chosen yet, Cloud said.
If the bond passes, the city could break ground on the project as early as next year, with 18-24 months of construction expected before completion, Cloud said.
Cloud said that the catalyst for the project was a report, released by the Northwest Regional Planning Commission in November, which estimated that Franklin and Grand Isle counties need 3,350 new or improved housing units just to meet the needs of its current residents, with more housing likely required to accommodate the region’s expected growth.
The report also emphasized a need for smaller units that serve single-person households over the detached single-family homes that currently dominate the area’s housing stock.
“St. Albans has adopted a housing for all approach,” Cloud said. “There are existing tools that are covering the more deeply affordable (housing), but there’s a gap at that next level up and we are responding, trying to fill that gap.”
Cloud noted that the project would likely be “mixed use” and would include commercial real estate on the ground floors of the buildings.