I want to thank Keith Dameron and the Iberia Bank for hosting an informative meeting. City and county officials explained the Community Redevelopment Authority Proposal (or “CRAP” for short), to an audience of some 50 or 60 Marco residents.

City Manager Steve Thompson, City Councilor Bill Trotter and County Commissioner Donna Fiala presented the purpose, application and goals of CRAP as clearly as could be expected of a subject that is, by its nature, quite cloudy.

Simply stated, CRAP allows the city to declare, (following certain guidelines), a specific area as blighted, although Thompson preferred using the term “economically obsolete.” The city would designate a Board to administer and oversee the CRAP.

The CRAP would then provide certain improvements to the blighted area, aiming to elevate its attractiveness and thus, its property value. If and when the CRAP succeeds in increasing the subject property’s value, the resulting increase in property tax revenue would be used incrementally to recover the cost of the improvements.

Of course, as in any financial experiment, there are some risks involved. For example, because the CRAP benefit for an area expires after a specified number of years, the expected rise in property tax revenues might not reach the level of monies spent to make the improvements in the first place. Although proper planning and calculating can reduce this risk considerably, the CRAP can still be characterized as a, (dare I say it?) a crapshoot. It’s unclear to me as to who becomes financially liable if the CRAP upgrades fail to provide the hoped-for revenues.

During the meeting, Marco personality Don Farmer raised an excellent point with which I heartily agree: Why not keep government completely out of this issue and simply allow the American free market philosophy to function as usual in this so-called “economically obsolete” area. Why establish yet another unnecessary layer of governmental bureaucracy?

Another point of interest resulted from Don’s spouse, Chris Curle, asking if any owners of property in the blight zone were in the room. No hands were raised. Odd. Our $10 million Veterans’ Community Park (Glon Property) falls within the blight zone so it would seem that all Marco taxpayers own a good portion of that blight zone. This might also be the rationale for having Marco Island taxpayers join the City Council in deciding CRAP.

All said, it was a very pleasant event. Thank you all, and congratulations to Iberia Bank on this, their inaugural “In the Round” public meeting series.

Russ Colombo

Marco Island