About a year and a half ago, Petal Ward 3 Alderman Blake Nobles began talks with other city officials and the Area Development Partnership to designate an official Central Business District in the city, designed to provide tax incentives for new and existing businesses within the city limits.
That initiative got its ceremonial start on January 18, with a ribbon cutting held at Petal City Hall to officially announce the project. The district was approved via ordinance during the December 6 board meeting of the Petal Board of Aldermen, where board members said the it will encourage the economic revitalization of the area through the granting of ad valorem tax exemptions for the promotion of business and commerce.
“(When) I came into office, I really told people that I wanted to help with our downtown area, and this is that first step,” Nobles said. “I met with Todd Jackson (executive vice president of economic development and chamber of commerce at the ADP) early into my term, and he walked me down the path for a pretty good ways.
“Then I eventually started working with Kaitlyn Smith (at the ADP), who has been a core companion in helping the city walk through this process. We’re just trying to incentivize businesses to come here and really find a home in downtown Petal, so that they and our residents – and any tourists – can have a fantastic experience.”
The area is broken down into two sectors: Petal Central Business District North, which runs east of U.S. 11 toward Old Richton Road, and the Petal Central Business District South, which runs along South Main Street at West 10th Avenue and goes toward the Leaf River. The north district is comprised of several parcels off of West Central Avenue, East Central Avenue, South George Street, North Main Street and South Main Street. The southern district consists mostly of parcels off of Carterville Road, Dawson Cutoff and South Main Street.
Under provisions of the project – which is the result of a joint partnership between the Petal Board of Aldermen, the Forrest County Board of Supervisors, the ADP and the Petal Area Chamber of Commerce – gives municipalities the authority to exempt from any or all municipal ad valorem taxes, excluding ad valorem taxes for school district purposes, for a period of not more than seven years.
That exemption includes any renovations of – and improvements to – existing structures located within the district, or new construction for commercial uses in the area. The renovation or improvement of the property must be for the promotion of business or historic preservation in the district and may be granted only after an application has been made to the governing authorities of the municipality.
Some of the exact provisions are as follows:
- For renovation and/or improvement projects, a tax abatement of seven years may be granted, if the minimum project investment is at least $5,000.
- For new construction projects, a tax abatement of seven years may be granted for the demolition of old structures and/or construction of new structures, if the minimum project investment is at least $500,000.
- A tax abatement of five years may be granted to projects which affect demolition of old structures and/or construction of new structures, if the minimum project investment is at least $250,000.
- A tax abatement of three years may be granted for projects that affect demolition of old structures and/or construction of new structures, if the minimum project investment is at least $150,000.
“For current businesses, it’s going to give them an opportunity to renovate their businesses – their publicly-accessible interiors,” Nobles said. “In doing so, it’ll stop the ad valorem taxes from rising on them for a number of years. That’s just so that our current businesses have as much of an incentive as they can to redesign their businesses, do any updates they want to do, anything along those lines – so long as they spend $5,000 to cross that bar.
“Then for new businesses, we forgive ad valorem taxes from the city and the county the same way, depending on how much they spend. If they spend $150,000, they get three years; if they spend $250,000 they get five years; and if they spend $500,000 they get seven years of abatement. For a business with a property value of five or six hundred thousand dollars, that’s $70,000 in savings.”
The project is currently live, and business owners are encouraged to submit an application online at www.cityofpetal.com, www.petalchamber.com, or www.theadp.com.
“We have tried for so long to have something (like this), and we haven’t been blessed with what your traditional downtown would look like – we don’t have the two-story buildings or things of that nature that some cities have been blessed with,” Mayor Tony Ducker said. “So we’re taking a run at this to try to improve this area, revitalize it, so to speak.
“We’ve got a lot of growth in other parts of our town, but we want the citizens of Petal to know that we’re actually going to strike a chord in every part of this town. Our downtown is a very important part of that, so we need to have a thriving downtown area.”
Forrest County District 3 Supervisor Burkett Ross, who owns the bowling alley on South Main Street in Petal, said he looks forward to the growth the new business district is expected to bring.
“We don’t want to have a blighted area in downtown, so it’s important that we take some steps now to try to get some people to come back down, and maybe get some new businesses to fill up some of the (vacancies) downtown,” he said. “So we’re happy to be a part of it, and hope it will draw some people downtown.”
