MONITORING & COMPLIANCE

Our Monitoring and Compliance Division is charged with tracking and recording community and economic development incentives and programs. They ensure recipients of City support comply with federal and local regulations, covenants set out by City agreements, and key performance indicators developed in coordination with the City of Cincinnati. This process ensures investments made by the Department of Community and Economic Development have the greatest impact on the community and maximize the City’s return on investment.

MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Implementing the Incentive Review Report Recommendations Over the last year, the Monitoring and Compliance Division has taken major strides to expand the department’s oversight of incentivized businesses based on recommendations made from our incentive review. These changes include building upon our existing framework to make processes more efficient, ensuring accuracy and completeness of data, and implementing a more rigorous monitoring process. One pre-existing process that we improved this past year is the annual self-reporting process for both the Job Creation Tax Credits (JCTCs) and Commercial Reinvestment Area (CRA) incentives. This process requires recipients to provide updates on their compliance by submitting a report on jobs created and retained and confirming the amount of investment in their projects. The improvements we made include providing the option to complete and submit the annual report forms online. For the recipients, this makes the reporting process faster and more efficient. For us, it reduces data entry (saving staff time) and ensures data automatically gets stored into our database upon its submission.

Next, to oversee and ensure the accuracy and completeness of the reporting information and all other departmentwide data, we created a Data Integrity Team (DIT). This team, which is managed by a Data Integrity Manager, ensures data integrity by recommending improvements to our data-collection and reporting systems and regularly reviewing the accuracy and completeness of the data.

Lastly, following the incentive review report, the Monitoring and Compliance Division began to develop a more rigorous monitoring process that includes surveillance reviews. This process requires division staff to select projects and conduct in-person meetings with recipients and visit project sites throughout the lifecycle incentive. Through surveillance reviews, our staff can proactively verify the accuracy of companies’ self-reported submittals as well as build a better relationship with those individuals making strategic investments within the City. To date, 24 surveillance reviews have been completed that have varied by program, neighborhood, and project type.

Tax Incentive Conversion The Monitoring and Compliance Division oversaw the conversion of 11 Property Investment Reimbursement Agreements to the tax credit method of payment for these incentives in 2016. This conversion is important because it eliminated appropriations of general fund dollars to reimburse companies based on the incentive they received. Instead, companies now receive a refundable tax credit against the company’s tax liability without changing the tax incentive benefit amount. Operating Contract Monitoring Process Improvement DCED began working with the City Administration to ensure the important work performed by general fund operating contract recipients supports the mission and goals of the Department. To this end, we partnered with the Office of Performance Data Analytics (OPDA) to implement a process that provides greater transparency in the spending of City funds by organizations that have contracts managed by our department. In 2016, this list included the following organizations: African American Chamber of Commerce, CDC Association of Greater Cincinnati, CincyTech, Cintrifuse, Film Cincinnati (formerly Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Film Commission), MORTAR, Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority, REDI Cincinnati, and the University of Cincinnati Economics Center as well as a variety of human services contracts.

DCED staff worked with each of the organizations to ensure the goals, objectives, and scope of services stated in their City agreements reflected the City’s and DCED’s mission, and to improve the quality of agreed upon key performance indicators. DCED staff will continue to monitor these organizations and their programs through quarterly reports and regular evaluation reviews by OPDA and the City Manager. Through this new process, the City hopes to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its service delivery through these programs, thus maximizing the benefits of each dollar spent by the City on them.