After a 50-minute conversation about the sixth-penny, special-purpose tax, Green River council members decided to think about what projects they want to fund and how much to ask for this time.
City Administrator Reed Clevenger kicked off the discussion by giving the Green River City Council an overview of what the tax is and what it has been used for in the past. The money can only be used for defined projects voters approved it to be spent it on at an election. Most of the money the city has received has gone toward streets and infrastructure improvements. Clevenger also informed the Council what other counties are doing, such as Albany County which passed a sixth-penny tax for $65 million, which will be paid for over a 10 to 12 year span and Carbon County, which will pay for their sixth-penny tax of about $67 million over a 4-6 year span.
Clevenger said the city has various needs it would like to address through the tax, such as improvements to the Green River Recreation Center Pool and track, upgrading the Greenbelt and numerous streets in desperate need of repairs.
He said what most residents don’t understand is the state has decreased the city’s funding by 50 percent. A lot of that money was used to complete these types of projects.
“We have to have another way to pay for infrastructure,” Clevenger said. “We were looking at five to six years.”
He said the need to come up with other funding options is a must. He said they could possibly create their own city one-cent tax to pay for what the projects they need completed, but they can only do that after a sixth-penny tax was in place already. This is still on option that needs more research.
Councilman Gary Killpack said he the city has cut their request down to about 57 million, but thinks that number may still be too high.
“We’re going to eat up all of the money the county says we can raise just for us,” he said.
Killpack said he thinks the Sweetwater County Commission is expecting the city to cut its request they already cut in half in half again. This would mean the city would need to figure out what projects they could do for $25 million.
The other option would be to “try to push the Commission” from a four-year commitment on the tax to a six-year time frame.
In a previous Commission meeting, the commissioners stated they would be more comfortable with an $80-million request, possibly up to $100 million, which would be paid off in four years. The commissioners felt the $230 million request, which would be paid off in about 13 years, was too much and the voters wouldn’t support it.
Clevenger said he would rather the Council shoot for the moon and request what they need.
Chris Meats, city finance director, said the cities and towns must come to a consensus and go before the Commission with a request. The Commission will then decide whether or not it goes on the ballot.
“They do have the upper hand in this process,” he said.
Councilwoman Lisa Maes said when the sixth-penny tax came off last time a lot of her constituents were surprised because they thought it was continuous. She feels the residents will support a higher amount and longer time-period tax.
“I think we should go for it and I think the citizens would support it,” Maes said.
Mayor Pete Rust said even though other communities have gone and passed the higher dollar tax amounts, which are paid off in a long period of time, all of those initiatives had county-wide support. They all worked together and supported it.
He asked the Council members to think about which route they wanted to go, talk to their constituents about what projects they wanted to see done and be ready to discuss it next week Tuesday at the Council’s workshop.
Reader Comments(0)