In 2022, the City of Brookings paid New York consulting firm Resonance $125,000 to provide a Community Economic Development Master Plan which was adopted by the Brookings City Council in January, 2023. Hidden on page 78 of the 106 page plan was Strategy 5.2 Explore A Business Improvement District (BID) downtown, which is a way for a city to impose additional taxes on all business and/or property owners within specific boundaries. The plan also described the scheme to accomplish that by hiring a firm to develop a Downtown Master Plan. The City of Brookings has a Performance Dashboard on their web site showing that they are now 80 percent of the way toward completing their goal of imposing a BID tax.

In March, 2023, a new Downtown Brookings organization was incorporated after several years of promotion of the downtown being handled by the Brookings Chamber of Commerce. This organization was formed without a vote or even a survey of all of the downtown business and property owners about whether they wanted a new association to be founded or how they would want it organized and funded if it was formed. Until the plan was adopted, many business owners did not even know that this new organization existed and that the Chamber of Commerce was no longer handling downtown promotion and events.

Later in 2023, the City of Brookings hired a different out of state consulting firm RDG Planning & Design to work with the city and the organization to create the Downtown Master Plan at a cost of $115,000. Throughout 2024, there were several newspaper articles, a web site, and several meetings and online requests for public comments about the plan which were all about physical characteristics of the downtown area with no mention of the tax. It was only mentioned in a single sentence on one poster at the final open house in August which just said that a BID would "help with maintenance of sidewalks, streetscape, safety, and Downtown Brookings Organization budget" without explaining how it would impose new taxes to pay these costs.

The complete Master Plan was supposed to be published in August according to the plan's official web site and be presented to the City Council for adoption in October. However it was not made public until it appeared in the City Council agenda a few days before the October 8 meeting when the Council was scheduled to vote on the resolution adopting the plan. Only then were the plans for the tax published and described in detail. The tax is mentioned in so many places throughout the actual now published plan that it could not have just been accidentally omitted from all public information about the plan. Even the City Council did not receive the complete plan in time to read through the entire 94 page document before the October 8 meeting. So they tabled it for two weeks, but then passed it unanimously with no changes at their October 22 meeting.

• The BID tax is a new tax that would be paid to the City of Brookings in addition to the millions of dollars that the city already receives each year from downtown business and property owners in property taxes, sales taxes, and alcohol sales. An additional tax that must be paid only by businesses downtown will deter businesses from locating there and may influence existing businesses to leave downtown.

• A BID has more taxing power than a city government has for property taxes. In addition to being able to tax real estate property owners, a BID can also directly charge business owners an occupancy tax whether they own or rent their business location. A BID can also issue bonds to be paid from those taxes and the BID could not be dissolved until all of those bonds are paid off. Spending decisions are made by a board and may not be directly referred to a vote of the businesses that are being taxed. Although the State of South Dakota has limits on the maximum sales tax and property tax rates that local governments can charge, state laws have no limits on BID taxes.

• If the BID board wants to increase taxes or expand the borders of the district, it can be approved by the City Council. Downtown Sioux Falls has a BID that was established in 1989 that was a few city blocks in area with a cap limiting the maximum tax to $1,700 per property, but it has expanded several times since then and now includes 120 blocks in Sioux Falls with plans to expand even more in the future, and their City Council voted to remove the cap in 2022.

• Even though the name Business Improvement District makes it sound like any tax revenue would be used to make improvements to the district, most BID taxes including those proposed in the Downtown Master Plan go to pay salaries and other operating expenses for an organization like the current Downtown Brookings organization and to provide services that are already being paid from other taxes or by business and property owners themselves, like trash removal, snow shoveling, and maintaining flowers and plantings. However all spending decisions would be made by the organization instead of by the business and property owners who are paying for them.

• Downtown Brookings, Inc. (DBI) was a previous downtown association that tried to impose a BID tax in 2003, but it was opposed by a large majority of downtown business owners including many who still own businesses and property downtown. When the business owners informed Downtown Brookings Inc. that we had enough signed petitions to stop the tax, they canceled it from the City Council agenda a day before the meeting so the petitions could not be presented and business owners could not make public comments about the tax and the organization at the meeting.

• Each of the three Catalyst Projects would significantly reduce off-street parking. There are currently 230 apartments downtown according to the Downtown Master Plan, and there are currently 374 off-street parking spaces downtown according to a parking map on the Downtown Brookings organization's web site. If the 38 parking spaces behind the Old Armory, the 125 parking spaces in the 72-hour parking lot on Third Avenue, and the 45 parking spaces in the 24-hour parking lot on Fifth Avenue are all lost, there would only be 166 off-street parking spaces available including the parking lots by the Public Library, Community Center, and City & County Government Center. Subtracting the 38 parking spaces in the Library parking lot which are reserved for Library use while the Library is open leaves only 128 off-street parking places that are available 24 hours per day. A few buildings with apartments downtown have off-street parking spaces on their own property, but most use public parking lots to meet the off-street parking requirement needed to maintain their rental licenses and being able to continue renting out their apartments.

• In addition to the Catalyst Projects and BID Tax, the plan includes many projects that would cause traffic hazards including adding diagonal parking to Third Avenue while designating it as a truck route since it is a through street with no stop signs, using light poles to project distracting patterns onto sidewalks instead of lighting the streets and sidewalks for safety, and routing vehicle traffic through the City Plaza parking lot where customers are trying to walk from their parked cars to business front doors. The plan also encourages pedestrian use of alleys where there are no sidewalks or extra space to add sidewalks, even though delivery vehicles and employees and tenants that use alleys to access parking spaces would need to continue driving down the alleys day and night.

• The plan also includes many ideas that contradict each other. Besides adding diagonal parking to Third Avenue while designating it as a truck route, there are also options to tear down existing buildings to build a park while constructing new buildings on the Third Avenue parking lot, and using bricks to pave the alleys while needing to remove the existing brick pavers that are tripping hazards on the sidewalks on Main Avenue. Diagonal parking on Third Avenue would not be a reasonable replacement for the parking lost by selling the 72-hour lot since overnight parking needed by downtown residents is prohibited on streets downtown, and backing out of diagonal parking places on a through street with continuous traffic could lead to many accidents.

• While the plan preserves historic buildings on Main Avenue, it shows future land use plans for many buildings on Third and Fifth Avenues being demolished and replaced with a park and new large four story apartment buildings, even though according to the plan itself smaller buildings are more compatible near historic districts.

Petitions were circulated to attempt to put the City Council's resolution adopting the plan to a public vote, but there were not enough signatures collected before the deadline. Thank you to everyone who cares enough about Downtown Brookings to circulate or sign petitions.

The authors of the plan said at the City Council meeting when it was adopted and in their online FAQs page that they would not implement concepts from the plan without community support. To assist them in finding out which concepts do have community support, many downtown businesses have short one-page surveys available now and through December 14 for anyone who shops, lives, or works downtown to indicate whether or not you support each of several major projects in the plan. You do not need to be a resident or registered voter in Brookings to participate in the survey. The results will be shared with the City of Brookings government and the authors of the plan, and they will also be published in local papers and online.

For any projects that are opposed by most of the community members that answer the survey, the authors of the plan should not bring them to the City Council for approval. If they do, the City Council should vote those projects down. If the Council passes any of them, petitions can be circulated to put each of those to a vote of citizens of Brookings. Now that many more people know about the Downtown Master Plan than knew about it when it was first adopted, we should be able to collect enough signatures to put them to a vote.

You can also download and print the survey from www.brosts.com/DMPSurvey.pdf and drop it off at any store in downtown Brookings with a Downtown Master Plan Survey Available Here sign or mail it to DMP Survey, PO Box 683, Brookings, SD 57006. If any downtown business or property owners did not receive any blank survey forms, you may print them yourself or call 605-692-7341 and someone will deliver some to you.