San Diego’s Center City Development Corporation (CCDC) wants legal authority to collect more money. CCDC is about 13 years away from reaching its financial cap and officials say they'll run out of money before they can pay for everything they've promised. The organization is beginning the process of trying to get that cap raised.
CCDC’s financial cap limits how much tax money it can collect from a project area. The Center City project area has a cap of nearly $3 billion. CCDC expects to reach that around 2023.
It will begin the process of trying to raise the cap by showing that blight still exists downtown and might not be removed before the cap is reached. Board Chair Fred Maas says there’s still a lot of work left to do downtown and not enough money in the current budget to do it. He says the Center City redevelopment area is only subject to the money cap because it was created in 1992.
"It was only in a very narrow window of a few years that those redevelopment areas that were created during those windows of time had this dollar cap," he said. "So had we been a year later, we wouldn’t even be talking about this today.”
Maas says the process of raising the cap could take between 12 and 18 months. The decision would require approval from several local agencies and would be reviewed by the state.
