Discussion, options for city’s tax burden going forward

With the looming need for street and utilities infrastructure and some major city facilities, mainly a new fire hall to meet requirements and to hold all equipment, residents at the three town halls held last month tended to have the sentiments of wanting the needed improvements, but do so in a fiscally responsible manner that doesn’t burden them with too high of taxes.

“You were talking about some of the streets didn’t have to go all the way down…So if you don’t have to fix the streets all the way down to the sewer line and water line and you can fix some of the surfaces, because some of them are really bad, and you can fix some of the surfaces to get us to five, 10 years to get us to then, you won’t have to spend a big amount of money,” said Pam Edel during the second town hall. “Is that what we are looking at?”

Mayor Thomas Eisert said, “That’s what we are here to talk about.”

City Administrator Brian Heck said, “You’re absolutely right Pam. The discussion that is happening and has been happening is what are all the other alternatives to full reconstruction? Are there options for street maintenance and repair that isn’t going to require a multi-million dollar project, but might be less. It’s not going to fix a road for 30 years. It might buy the city 15 years…and so what you’re looking at here, this bond drops off…as a couple bonds drop off, you build yourself a little capacity where you can borrow a little bit more and it doesn’t have impact on the overall tax.”

Doing a mill and overlay, fixing only surface areas and not replacing underground utilities is an option, but one that has some variables. In some cases, the roadbed underneath is not in a shape for the roadbed to remain intact for any period of time. As well, the infrastructure underneath may be in a shape where it will have likely continued failings if it is not replaced. The city had the entire city’s sewer and storm water utilities televised two years ago to assess the state of that infrastructure. In some places in the city, they are crumbling. In other areas, they are still in relatively good shape. One option to help the longevity of that type of infrastructure that was presented is the possibility of lining those utilities instead of replacing them, which could be an answer to stabilize them for a reasonable length of time at a much lower cost.

One resident said, “On the stuff you were talking about with doing a mill and overlay, can the infrastructure underneath, so sewer, water, and storm drain, can it handle another 15 years?”

Eisert said, “And that’s another good point too, and that’s why this isn’t that simple, like ‘Let’s just do this.’ We have our engineer, about two years ago, and we spent the time and basically hammered everything we got (televising). We know what it looks like. We know what the duration and life expectancy is. We are going to be looking at areas to see does this make sense? Does this not make sense? Can the structure actually hold it? …When you get into that 2031 and 2033 (Street and Utility Improvement Project — SUIP) areas, to me those are the worst streets in town. Surprisingly, for the age of the infrastructure, it’s in pretty good shape. So that’s a good candidate in that area to do that, and in this area up here, maybe not so much. We’ve had a lot of failing storm sewers in this particular area right here. We have to navigate through that and say, ‘Where and when does it make sense?’”

It was also suggested that the SUIPs could be spread out to every three or five years, allowing some debt to slowly drop off. The city also said that they could possibly pause the SUIPs to allow for facility improvements, which would also lessen impact on taxes.

Police department balloon payment

One way the city discussed lessening an impact of having an about $1 million dollar balloon payment on the police department facility in 2033 was to refinance it, extending the debt further out so it isn’t a spike in taxes significantly for that year. This would extend payments on it for a few years further, but more interest would be paid overall.

In response a resident said, “We cannot figure out why we cannot figure out how to pay that balloon payment on the police station. Let’s figure that out. Pay it off, and save on the interest.” Some suggested that this might be a good idea, but the likely impact of this would be to raise annual taxes from now until then to be able to pay that in full by that time period.

Going forward

Mayor Eisert said, “Once we have our last town hall meeting, council will be spending a significant amount of time on what we have heard from the residents of how we move forward.”

Council will be working with the city engineer and city administrator over the next months to devise some different options for long-term planning on this. Once that is completed, they said it would be very likely that they will again bring the community back together to look at the revised plans for a direction to take with new numbers and better-thought-out alternatives to the current plan for facilities, streets and infrastructure.

The next city council workshop is Monday, April 7, at 7 p.m., and the next city council meeting is on Monday, April 21, at 7 p.m. Both are at city hall in the council chambers and are open for the public to attend.

Please also see a letter from the mayor on the Opinion Page.