August 2024 Meeting
On August 27, 2024, Ybor Merchant’s Association met at the Dirty Shame at 6pm, immediately after the CRA Advisory Board Meeting. For now the plan is to continue meeting on the last Tuesday of every month at 6pm at Dirty Shame. This meeting was mostly a social kickoff. Going forward we will likely use the meeting room upstairs to discuss the issues we need to address.
Annual Meeting / Officers & Directors
A few weeks earlier the YMA met to elect its officers and directors, they are:
Tom DeGeorge, Crow Bar, President & Director
Ken Foutch, Coppertail Brewery, Vice President & Director
Chip Williams, Accountant, Treasurer & Director
Richard Boom, Dirty Shame, Director
Michael Murphy, Silver Meteor Gallery, Director
Rich McIntyre, 1920 / The Attic, Secretary & Director
CRA Advisory Board Meeting
TPD
TPD Reported that crime statistics are down by more than 50% year over year.
James Wilcher has been promoted to corporal and will be moving to nights. Our new community liaison officer is Bridget Curbelo. She has been working in Ybor for the past 5 years.
Code Enforcement
Parking. Code enforcement reported that they pursued a large group of violations for failure to have an attendant in the parking lots (6) and for failure to maintain the parking lots (13) before a special master a few weeks ago.
The special master (a person serves as a judge) ruled against the parking lot owners on 4 of 6 cases regarding the attendant and on all of the maintenance violations. The fines for the attendant violations were nominal and the special master fined the lot owners $100 / day for the maintenance violations, but gave them 6 months to fix the violations before the fines would begin.
As the code is being modified regarding parking lot attendants, code enforcement probably won’t pursue further violations until the new ordinance have been enacted.
Signs vs Graffiti. City Code 19-57(b) requires building owners to remove graffiti from their buildings. The Code Enforcement officer issued no graffiti citations but has been actively pursuing citations against the bars and restaurants for signs (physical and light projection). To illustrate, Bad Monkey was cited for projecting an image of a police flag on the sidewalk but did not issues a single citation for the 10+ graffiti images on the Amphitheater.
Arts & Cultural Affairs
Presentation by Corey Roberts, project coordinator. They are going to commission some murals.
Community Redevelopment Plans
CRA 1 and 2 both have Community Redevelopment Plans and a Strategic Action Plan which speak to how the CRAs should spend their money and how the government should manage the districts. These were created around 20 years ago and have been amended several times.  They are going to be redrafted in the near future. If you are interested, you can read them at https://www.tampa.gov/cras/ybor/documents.
CRA Primer
For background, Ybor has 2 CRA districts. One is the entertainment district including 7th Ave, the other is more residential.
CRA’s are funded from the annual increase in real estate taxes for the district starting in the year that the CRA was formed. So as the taxable value of the properties in Ybor increase the additional taxes are placed into a trust account which must be spent in accordance with the CRA statute.
Each CRA has a board of directors who are elected by Tampa City Council. Our city council members elected themselves as the directors for each board. They also made a decision to hold 10% of the money deposited into each CRA account to be spent on affordable housing in each CRA District.
The Florida Statutes have been amended to drastically limit what the CRA’s can spend the money on. These are some of the things that they can spend money on now:
Block by Block – People in yellow shirts who walk the community from morning to late night resolving problems and keeping the streets clean.
Infrastructure – Storm water projects, bricking the streets, the archways…
Real Estate Acquisition and Façade Repairs.
Studies
Social Media
YMA presence on the CRA Advisory Board – Tom DeGeorge (YMA Rep), Chip Williams, Michael Murphy, Carmine Iavarone and Rich McIntyre.
Next Meeting – September 24, 2024, 6pm at Dirty Shame