The Chadron City Council had one of its longest-ever workshop sessions last night, spending over 4-1/2 hours getting updates and details on about a dozen issues…some pressing, some longer-term.
Mayor Karin Fischer expected a long meeting since 12 different items were on the agenda, and wasn’t upset or disappointed it ran as long as it did. Council members were upbeat at its end, and Fischer says the depth and breadth of the discussion was exactly what she’d hoped to see.
Paris Fisher…the newest councilman and no relation to the mayor…liked the information presented and the interaction between council members and staff so much he suggested holding similar meetings on a regular basis, possibly as often as every 3 months.
About a quarter of the night was spent on the massive renovation and expansion of Chadron’s downtown stormwater drainage system and how to pay its roughly $4-million dollar cost. City Manager Wayne Anderson said Chadron LB-840 Reauthorization Committee is recommending funding the project by asking voters to renew the half-cent economic development sales tax that sunsets next year.
The panel proposes that 80% of the proceeds…about $320,000 a year…go to pay off bonds for the storm sewer project and the remaining 20% go to community development and better projects. That’s roughly the same split as in the current LB-840 program…which helped fund the new Chadron Community Hospital.
During last night’s occassionally emotional discussion, councilman Dr John Gamby…who’s returned to the council after a 2-year hiatus from 20-years of service…objected to the size and options for the project, saying that “others in the business” were telling him the city was getting “screwed over” by the engineer…the Leo A Daley firm of Omaha.
Gamby proposed letting the LB-840 tax expire…saying a renewal would “go down in defeat”…and instead using half of the city’s basic 1-cent sales tax for the drainage project. Gamby said the base tax…approved in the early 1980s…was to fund street work and lower property taxes, but had failed to do either.
Anderson offered a fact sheet showing the city’s sales tax and property tax numbers over the years…with the tax rate going up from a little over 64-cents per hundred the first year of the sales tax to 71-cents in 1995, then dropping to about 34-cents in 2000 before settling in between 29 and 37-cents before the council upped the rate to 42-cents two years ago.
Anderson warned that putting half the sales tax toward the project would require either a 16-cent increase in the property tax rate or cutting spending about $320,000 a year. He also listed nearly 80 jobs created by businesses that received LB-840 loans or grants and 16 community betterment projects totaling nearly $174,000 that were funded by the sales tax.
Anderson said he plans to ask the city council at one of its next meetings to approve sending the LB-840 proposal to the voters at a special election in late March or early April. He also said he’ll ask for a referendum later in the year on a proposal still being developed for a joint project with Chadron State College to enclose the city’s outdoor swimming pool with added amenities as a replacement for the now demolished Armstrong pool.
Anderson emphasized that the $3-1/2-to-$4-million dollar cost estimate is very rough since the city’s chosen consultant has yet to determine what the public wants in the new building, what is feasible, and the best way to achieve that. Anderson also said professional grant writers have already offered their services…free of charge…so there’s no way to know how much or what type of funding will be requested from Chadron residents.