The Bradenton City Council hosted a public hearing with their Community Redevelopment Agency identifying areas in the city that need to be redeveloped or rehabilitated in the interest of public health, safety, and welfare for the city.
A 2023 study identified and documented the existence of slum and blighted conditions across 16 sites in the city. Conditions like vacant buildings that have sat empty for years, faulty layouts, arrested development or failure to redevelop.
“Six of those sites are actually government owned by the county and the city,” Dr. Jeff Burton, Executive Director of the Bradenton Community Redevelopment Agency, said, “and that’s where CRA can come in and help, it is the bridge between the private sector and the public sector.”
“Montgomery Roberts, that lot has been vacant for 40 years, the old City Hall site, 20 years,” Marianne Barnebey, Bradenton City Councilwoman for Ward Two, said. “Significant pieces of property in our downtown, if we can encourage a revitalization of those areas, put them on the tax roll at a higher value, why wouldn’t we do that?”
The study area exhibits a predominance of conditions that impair the City’s sound growth. These conditions include defective street layouts, faulty lot layouts, deterioration of site improvements, diversity of ownership that prevents free alienability of land, and stagnation in aggregate assessed values due to a disproportionate concentration of government-owned, tax-exempt property. The conditions identified here are not merely aesthetic; they represent structural market failures that private enterprise, acting alone, has been unable to overcome.