A few facts from last night's joint Planning and Zoning, Historic Resource Preservation Board meeting

I am waiting for more documentation from the city that I will be including in a future post.  This consists of pdfs of some of the PowerPoint presentations and other graphics.  The city also engaged the services of the University of Miami architecture department to prepare the "what if" images and to test the code to it maximum limits - the "new" code, not the existing code which is much more permissive and allows and has allowed a 65 ft. height limit for many years.  They looked at all the lots considered "developable" east of Federal along Lake and Lucerne Avenues.  In a previous post, I provided some of these images, but there is now more information available.  So look for those coming soon.  Hotels within this area would be the only types of buildings that would be allowed to go to 65 ft., sans the referendum on height.  The likelihood that all six lots would be the home to hotels is highly unlikely.  If not, they would be taken up  - eventually over many years - by other uses.  These "other uses" would be limited to 45 ft. without the assistance of the referendum on height's passage.

A few facts that came out of the meeting I want to share with you now.  William Waters reported that for the past two years, when the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser called the city to inquire about development activity to determine property values in the city, he told them the city of Lake Worth didn't have any commercial development in 2011 and now is telling the same story to them in 2012.  The previous year the Appraiser's office had to call back three times to make sure that was true.  In their experience, it was highly unusual that a city the size of Lake Worth would not have any commercial projects.   Well, here we are now in the second year of no commercial redevelopment activity.

We also found out that Lake Worth has lost 66% of its total taxable property value since 2007 - two-thirds of the city's tax base.  We also learned that the of the 8,000 jobs lost in Palm Beach County since 2002, 1,800 of those lost jobs were from within the city limits of Lake Worth.  When questioned about the vailidity of those numbers, Mr. Waters said that those were indeed jobs lost within the city of Lake Worth based upon census tract data and other information. The loss of jobs does not reflect those people that are or were self-employed during the Great Recession who many were essentially unemployed during that period.

 Furthermore, 29.4 percent of Lake Worth's population ranks below the poverty line - compared to 33.6 percent of Belle Glade's and 24.6% of Riviera Beach's population, our nearest cohorts of Palm Beach County municipalities.

Add that to the 1,400 structures that are vacant or in some threat of foreclosure and you get a sense of where we are in terms of economic development.  The notion that the big, bad developer "wolf" being at the door is ludicrous.

More to come as I get additional information from the city.