How to Brief Your Mayor and Council on a TIF Deal

You’ve briefed a council before. You don’t need me to tell you how.

What’s changed is the structure. Developer-backed TIF is new in most of these states, which means the questions coming at you are new, and the ones that will hurt are the ones you get asked in open session with a camera on. That’s the actual risk here — not that you don’t understand the deal, but that you get asked something in public you haven’t pre-answered.

So this isn’t a briefing how-to. It’s a list of what’s coming and where to get the answers before it arrives.

Your mayor and your council members are afraid of different things

This is the part I’d change first if I were you, because most briefing packets treat these two audiences as one.

Your mayor’s exposure is citywide and electoral. The question underneath their questions is whether this ends up looking like public money handed to a private developer, and whether that shows up in the next campaign. They need the political defense — the term, the sunset, what comes back onto the rolls — and they need to hear it in a form they can say out loud to a hostile room.

Your council members’ exposure is narrower and more immediate. Most of them don’t have a finance background, they’re voting on something built out of bond structure and lien priority, and here’s the part that matters: they cannot admit confusion publicly. A council member who doesn’t understand the deal will not raise their hand and say so at the podium. They’ll either vote no or vote yes and resent you for it.

Same facts. Two different briefings.

Pre-brief privately, every time

If a council member encounters a hard question for the first time in public session, you’ve created the exact situation they’re most afraid of. And they will remember who put them there.

Individual conversations before the public hearing are the highest-return thing you can do. Not a packet — a conversation, where someone can ask a basic question with no audience and no record. That’s where the confusion gets resolved. The public hearing is not a place where anyone learns anything.

The five questions, and where the answers live

These are the ones that come up. Every time, in some form.

“Who pays if the project fails?” The single most important question in the room, and the answer turns on whether the developer signed a payment obligation or merely made a promise. Know which one your deal has and who specifically signed it.

“Does this take money from schools?” Do not answer no. The honest answer is that it depends on your state, and a school board member with a binder will dismantle a flat denial in ninety seconds. Kansas carves out the statewide school levy. Nebraska’s aid formula backfills equalized districts and does nothing for the rest. Know your state’s version before you’re asked.

“When does this end?” By statute, on a date certain. This is your best answer of the five and the one most often underused. Have the actual sunset year, not a range.

“How long until we close?” Count approval bodies, not days. If county increment is in the deal, you have a second calendar to synchronize, and that’s usually where the timeline actually goes.

“Isn’t this a handout to the developer?” The response is the structure itself. In a developer-backed deal, the municipality isn’t pledging its credit, and the incremental taxes from that specific project are what repays the bond.

Pick the one your council pushed back on hardest and put a single page in front of them on that question alone. One page on one issue lands better than a packet on all five.

What to leave out

This is where I’d push back on the instinct to over-prepare.

Bond structure, coverage ratios, and lien priority mechanics are your financial advisor’s job. If you hand a council member twelve pages of it, they will retain none of it and feel less prepared than if you’d handed them one page. Depth signals rigor to a financial advisor. To an elected official, it signals that you’re burying something.

Give them one defensible sentence per issue and stop. For sunset: this is a fixed-term investment in a property that graduates back onto the tax rolls at a higher value than it started. A council member with a sentence will use it at a town hall. A council member with a spreadsheet will not.

“I don’t know, and here’s how I’ll find out”

Say this out loud in the briefing. It does more for your credibility than having every answer.

Several of these questions genuinely require bond counsel — whether school district millage is capturable in your state, exactly how the lien release mechanics work, whether an existing mortgage holder has to consent. The correct answer to those is that counsel is confirming it and you’ll circulate the answer before the vote. Then actually circulate it.

Modeling that in front of your council also gives them permission to do the same thing when a constituent asks them something they can’t answer. Which is, in the end, most of what they’re worried about.

Disclosure: Hageman Capital purchases developer-backed TIF bonds from commercial real estate developers, so we have a capital-side interest in these transactions. This article is educational and is not legal or financial advice; confirm all state-specific questions with qualified bond counsel before relying on them.

Our free state-specific TIF guides for municipal officials are at hagemancapital.com.