ISO: What is it and How it affects you!

ISO is a term that most people rarely hear, but it can have a profound impact on your wallet! ISO stands for Insurance Services Office and it is a company that provides data about community risk to insurance companies. ISO basically tells your insurance company how risky it is for them to insure your home or property and, in-turn, the insurance company uses that information to determine how much to charge you monthly or your premium.

To determine risk, the ISO looks at various information to determine how risky your home or property is. ISO looks at the likelihood of natural disasters that may occur in your area such as earthquakes, tornados, flooding, and sinkholes. They may also look at the characteristics of your home such as what year the home was constructed, were any updates and renovations were ever completed, does the home include fire alarms, are there deadbolts installed, and does the home have an alarm system.

One of the last, but certainly the biggest, is the services provided by your local governments. They look at what building codes and standards are adopted and enforced by the local government. They consider the condition of the infrastructure such as the ability of the water lines in the area to provide adequate water and pressure in the event of a fire. One of the categories with the most points is the fire suppression category. In this category, they consider many things, including the number of firemen employed per citizen, the number and types of fire trucks, location of fire stations in relation to your home, how much training is provided, and back-up agreements. All of this information is aggregated and used to determine how much risk there is that your home would be damaged from any kind of disaster.

ISO comes to Elizabethton every four years to evaluate our system to determine what our ISO rating is. This year Elizabethton moved up from a Class 4 rating to a Class 3 rating, placing our fire department in the top 5 percent of all fire departments in the United States for fire suppression. A Class 3 rating reflects on the excellent job our fire fighters are doing as well as the improvements to our water infrastructure to be able to provide the fire department with water needed to put out fires. A savings on home insurance via ISO is another way your city government is working to create a better community to live in. Let’s talk about this!

Is Elizabethton Ready for a TIF?

The Progress Edition of the Elizabethton Star talked a lot about development. Specifically, the concept of a TIF (Tax Increment Financing) District was discussed. I’ve had a lot of questions about what a TIF is, what it will cost, and how it can help Elizabethton. Just to be clear with our geography here, city officials, economic development officials, and some property owners have been in discussions about making the area along Elk Avenue from Sycamore Shoals State Park to Krystal’s and north to the Watauga River a TIF District.

First, let’s look at how a TIF works. TIFs are an incentive tool that the State of Tennessee allows local governments to utilize in order to help encourage and incentivize new development. Often times this tool is utilized in cases where the cost to develop are prohibitive because of contamination concerns, lack of roads, water, or sewer, or the cost to redevelop existing buildings is not profitable. Places like these are obvious problems for cities because they lower surrounding property values, encourage crime, and create an aesthetic eye sore on the community.

When a TIF is created, local governments continue to receive the same amount in property taxes that they collected before the TIF is created. Because the new district has been formed developers become interested in constructing new developments within the district. As the property value increases, the amount that the property owner would pay in property taxes will increase as well. What is unique to a TIF district is that the difference between the taxes paid before the TIF was created to what they what they would be during the TIF is set aside to help pay for improvements within the district.

Many TIFs in Tennessee last for 25 years and after the 25 year period all of the taxes (what the city and county were collecting before the TIF and the taxes being set aside during the TIF) are now turned back over to the city to use for general operations.

The benefit this could provide to Elizabethton is new development and re-development of the old North American land. An incentive program like this can be very attractive to developers both local and nationwide. TIFs can also be used in a variety of ways with liability falling to a developer or to a city or county.

Locally, the successes of TIFs have been proven. The new Bass Pro development is a TIF development. The Cabela's site in Bristol, Virgina is a TIF. Downtown Johnson City is redeveloping their downtown using a TIF program. It is a tool that has been proven in case study after case study. Is it time for Elizabethton to use it? Let’s talk about it!

Is Form-Based for Elizabethton?

One of the newest trends in Planning is a concept call form-based zoning codes. Form-based zoning codes take our conventional concept of zoning and reverse it. Instead of focusing on regulating the land use (what is happening on the property) first, building type second, and building aesthetics last, form-based codes are more concerned with building aesthetics first, building type second, and land use last.

Form-based zoning codes are more commonly seen in places that have a 19th Century development pattern – a time before cars when everything had to be easily accessed by walking or bicycling. Downtowns are a great example of what a form-based code would produce from a commercial district. The focus is more on the look and patterning of the windows and doors rather than on the specific use of the building. It could be a retailer, an office, or an apartment building.

Modern form-based zoning codes are utilized in developments in which the developer desires a mix of various types of land uses, such as residential, retail, office, medical office, small production, and restaurants.

As I mentioned before, the actual use of the property is not of primary concern in a form-based code, but rather the appearance and location of the building on the property is of primary concern. This allows for the property owner to have greater freedom in determining what uses to utilize in a building.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this might work. In Elizabethton, if Walmart wanted to relocate to just on the edge of downtown they would be able to construct their typical Walmart layout with the big parking lot in the front with a huge building set far from the road. With a form-based zoning code, however, Walmart would be required to locate their entire business into what would appear as multiple different buildings matching a downtown window and door patterning. They would also be required to place their parking lot in the back of the building to help hide it from view.

In this example, the focus is not on the use of the Walmart, but more about ensuring that the Walmart building would blend in with the appearance of the existing neighborhood. Rather than the big front wall, Walmart would look like a two or three story downtown building with multiple entrances.

This is a new concept and has started to really take hold in many cities. Locally, Kingsport has implemented some form-based zoning codes in their downtown area. Is this concept something Elizabethton should consider? Let’s talk about it!