LAWTON –The City of Lawton and Lawton Economic Development Authority (LEDA) signed an agreement with the Center for Economic Development Law (CEDL) as they eye developments that had been in the works before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
It’s the first approval in a three-way agreement between the entities, said Deputy City Manager Richard Rogalski said. The CEDL are “specialists in working with economic development and our taxes in the finance districts,” he added.
The agreement, which will focus on Tax Increment Financing (TIF), was finalized Thursday during the LEDA meeting.
“There’s two things with that agreement,” Rogalski said. “There’s an agreement with the industry that they help us with, but we also have to set up those individual TIF districts, and there’s a lot of documentation and paperwork to do and legal documents to do on that. So, they assist us on both parts of that process.”
Initially, the agreement was supposed to have been done earlier in the year, but Rogalski said the spread of COVID-19 put many things on hold.
“It’s effective whenever you sign it and then it rolls forward until the end of the year,” he said. “Everything got pushed off, and we were so focused on those other issues that we didn’t get a lot of things done. But nothing happened in the meantime. We haven’t had any industries to work on, so it really wasn’t a problem.”
The CEDL represents cities, towns, counties, public trusts, and other local public entities in Oklahoma on a range of development activities. The firm also represents nonprofit organizations and development entities in structuring public-private partnerships to facilitate development, operation, or management of special projects, places, and activities.
The Oklahoma City-based firm offers services in the creation of legal and financial strategies for economic and community development projects. It specializes in the representation of government entities and has developed a depth of knowledge and understanding of the legal, political, and policy frameworks that shape Oklahoma.
“Typically, industries will come in and look for ... some incentive program,” Rogalski said. If “an industry came to work with us and there was an incentive agreement that we put together, they (CEDL) would help us with that agreement. Then they would help us actually create the TIF district, and that TIF district is what basically funds the agreement.”
This is not a new partnership for the City of Lawton. The two groups have worked together on projects in the past.
“Lawton Economic Development Authority has had an annual agreement with them for a number of years,” Rogalski said. “They have assisted us with the setup of our TIF 1 and TIF 2 in the downtown area, and also with our industrial TIFs. They actually worked with the city in setting up those industrial TIF districts out at the West Industrial Park and the Airport Industrial Park.”
The current agreement, however, is slightly different. Instead of two separate agreements with LEDA and the City of Lawton, they’re doing an all-in-one agreement between the three groups.
“The city entered into an agreement with the Center for Economic Development Law sometime around maybe last summer and had those TIF districts all set up. [I]t was all completed and so now it’s a matter of implementation.”