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Worksession Memo . February 6, 2009 Page Municipal Development Assistance Quite frankly there haven't been many formal requests for development assistance in the last few years. From time to time, staff will receive phone calls from parties about development incentives in New Brighton. Typically, these are general inquires and not site specific. In a few cases, inquiries are made about a particular site. Since 2004, we are aware of less than a half dozen site-specific inquiries: Cub Foods at Rice Creek Road; Davidson Companies site at Old Highway 8 and Highway 96 (now the Hilton Garden Inn) and Interplant Sales. In each case a few hours of staff time and consultant time was spent to analyze the proposals. In the Cub Foods and Davidson Companies requests, the projects didn't meet eligibility criteria for TIF assistance. In our judgment it wasn't worthwhile spending the Council's work session time on requests that weren't eligible for tax increment assistance. Interplant Sales did meet the eligibility criteria, which is why staff forwarded the proposal for Council consideration. Attached as Exhibit A is a proposed ordinance that would amend Chapter 2 of the City Code and add a new section known as Article 8 — Requests for Municipal Development Assistance. The section would establish the process for making requests to the City. The basic concept is a two-step process involving an exploratory application fee and written narrative. This preliminary application would submitted to the Council for discussion at a work session. If the Council is interested in the project, the developer would proceed to the second step and prepare more detailed plans. A separate fee would be required for Phase Two. If the project proceeds to the contract negotiation stage, the developer would be required to make an additional deposit to cover the City's professional service costs. Staff believes this ordinance amendment is reasonable and should be relatively easy to implement. Ironically, just yesterday staff received a call from a real estate advisor representing a local business that would like to expand their operations. Land Use Applications The City collects application fees for ail land use application based on the attached schedule (Exhibit C). Theoretically, these fees help cover the City's cost to process an application. In reality, however, some applications involve more staff time and on occasion the use of outside professionals (i.e. city attorney, engineer, etc.) In these instances the cost is absorbed as normal course of business. After reflecting on the comments made about the need to collect application deposits, staff has drafted a proposed ordinance (Exhibit B) which would require a cash deposit for certain types of land use applications. We have tried to focus on the types of