Minutes 03/20/2007 - Laserfiche WebLink

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March 20. 2007 Citywide Economic Development Portsmouth is starting to see the value of economic development investments. Five are worth noting: Wal-Mart The retail renaissance for the Midtown corridor was initiated with the opening of the Wal-Mart Supercenter on January 19, 2007. The 204,000-square-foot facility is a new source of tax revenue for the city and is eventually expected to generate an estimated $1.2 million annually. The tax revenues estimated for the FY08 budget are $746,000. The MAST Center Located on a boundary of the cities of Portsmouth and Suffolk, is the Modeling Analysis Simulation Technology (MAST) Center. Portsmouth will host four buildings on this 32- acre corporate research park. In August the ODU Tri-Cities Higher Education Center is scheduled to open. This 50,000-square-foot new venue of higher education will be a state-of-the-art facility and will support a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses and programs. APM Terminals of Virginia, Inc. is scheduled to open later this summer. The tax revenues estimated for the FY08 budget are $2.1 million. Victory Village Victory Village is a 135-acre development that includes office, residential, retail, hospitality and education uses. The site will also be the location for the Fred W. Beazley Portsmouth Campus of Tidewater Community College. New Port New Port is already under construction. As the region's first Traditional Neighborhood Development it will have 1,600 homes built on 200+ acres and represent more than $400 million in private investments. 77 single family homes have already been sold or occupied. InvestinQ in City Employees The proposed budget recommends a 4.5 percent General Wage increase for full -time employees. The total cost is $3.4 million including the additional retirement costs of another $500,000. I want to say a few words about Public Safety salaries and benefits since this subject has been before City Council and is now in the news media. Funding Public Safety salaries and benefits is a unique challenge in Portsmouth for several reasons. First, we have two different retirement systems for Police and Fire. Nearly 200 Public Safety personnel are in the closed-out Portsmouth Police and Fire Retirement System and the remaining 300 are in the Virginia Retirement System. Some of our officers can retire after twenty years of service with sixty percent of their pay. Or they can work twenty-five years and get 70 percent of their pay. Those officers are in a retirement system that was closed twelve years ago because it was so expensive to taxpayers. Other officers must work twenty-five years under the current Virginia Law Enforcement Officers System to achieve 42 percent of pay.