We’ve written before about the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program before, whether it is the projects it has funded, the requests made to it by local governments, and, in a July 2010 blog how in its relatively short history (it was created in 1986) the state had upped the credit limit through the years to where it stood at a borrowing cap of $4.0 billion in 2010. Much acceleration on the cap occurred in the mid to late part of the last decade. Overall it took 26 years to get to that borrowing level.
Now the state House has passed legislation that would make a lot of significant changes to the program but its main thrust is that it would gradually decrease the cap that would begin with an immediate reduction of $550 million and then $50 million each year from 2012 through 2019. The amount would increase to $150 million in 2020 until the cap gets to $1.5 billion, or roughly the level it was at in 2002.
A quick calculation shows that the level would be reached in 2029 assuming a strict adherence to the schedule. Roughly 17 years, the same time frame it took the RACP to grow from its initial 1986 appropriation to its 2002 level.
