The board in charge of a special tax zone in Texarkana, Texas, wants to see more numbers before deciding whether to make it smaller.
At a meeting Wednesday, the panel that oversees the city's tax increment reinvestment zones tabled discussion of shrinking TIRZ 2, which encompasses downtown and corridors along Texas Boulevard and West Seventh Street. The board will request up-to-date property values from Bowie County Appraisal District before a vote on whether to confine the zone to downtown only.
A TIRZ maps out an area targeted for development and establishes its base value as the total tax appraisal of property in the zone the year it is created. If in subsequent years the zone's appraisal goes up, property taxes collected on the portion that exceeds the base value can be spent only in the zone, and only on improvements that benefit the public.
Total property value in TIRZ 2 has gone down since the zone was established in 2009, due in large part to the bankruptcy of Wadley Regional Medical Center the same year. The downtown TIRZ was appraised at more than $54 million for fiscal year 2015-16, more than $11.5 million less than the base value established in 2009.
The planned investment of $20 million to renovate the Hotel Grim and two nearby buildings downtown would help make up the deficit. City officials hope that changing TIRZ 2's boundaries by removing the Texas Boulevard and Seventh Street "legs" could also help by eliminating properties from the zone-including Wadley-that could decrease in value.
If redrawn, TIRZ 2 would continue to use the 2009 appraisal of properties within it as its base value.
