A Greenwood city board has more than $7 million in property taxes to spend each year, but whether elected officials should have more say in how the funds are spent is up for debate.
The Greenwood Redevelopment Commission is in charge of spending the money collected in Greenwood’s TIF districts, a figure which was $7.6 million in 2015.
The districts collect property taxes in a specific section of the city and from specific businesses. The taxes are meant to be used for projects such as infrastructure improvements to bring economic development to the area.
Some of the taxes collected in the TIF districts would otherwise have ended up in the city coffers, while a portion of the taxes collected would have gone to other tax districts, such as schools and libraries.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]
A five-member board is in charge of spending those funds. Three members are appointed by Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers, and the remaining two are named by the Greenwood City Council. A non-voting school board member is also part of the board.
At the crux of the debate over council appointments was whether the redevelopment commission member should be someone who is an elected member of the city council or a non-elected resident. Past council appointees to the redevelopment commission have mostly included residents involved with local businesses and the community.
The state legislature is considering proposals that would give city councils more control over redevelopment commissions and replace one of the mayoral appointments with a school board appointee who can vote.
Council members Brent Corey, Chuck Landon and David Lekse suggested a council member would be a better choice for appointments to the redevelopment commission, because the council should have more oversight over tax dollar spending.
The council approved appointing a second council member to the commission last week, over the objections of three council members, including Gibson, who warned that the move was one that residents of Greenwood weren’t in support of.
The matter initially came up because appointments to the redevelopment commission are made at the start of each year.
The council reappointed council president Mike Campbell to the redevelopment commission, and voted 6-2 to appoint council member Chuck Landon to replace current redevelopment commission member Don Cummings. Members Ezra Hill and David Hopper voted no; Linda Gibson abstained, saying the council should have waited and come back with a non-council member selection they could have all agreed on.
The council had been gridlocked the past two meetings over whether to re-appoint Cummings or replace him with Randy Goodin. Cummings works for Endress+Hauser in Greenwood and is a co-founder of Journey Johnson County. Goodin is a project manager for Elekta, which builds cancer treatment machines and software, and is president of Concerned Citizens of Southeast Greenwood.
Corey said Cummings and Goodin both had the necessary experience to serve on the redevelopment commission, but said he felt the position should go to an elected council member instead.
“The city council is an elected fiscal body of the city, they should have oversight of the biggest amount of money available,” Corey said.
Because of the enormous power the redevelopment commission has, with unilateral ability to spend tax dollars, the council needs a direct say in the decisions that are being made and should place two council members on the redevelopment commission, he said.
Putting council members on the redevelopment commission is the best way to represent the interests of Greenwood residents, Landon said.
“We are hired by the people,” he said. “We’re responsible to the people.”
One of the founding members of the redevelopment commission, Garnet Vaughan, spoke out against appointing more council members to the commission, saying that the amount of work and preparation would be difficult for people serving on both boards, and that doing so deprives qualified residents of the opportunity to serve their community.
As long as residents are willing to serve on boards such as the redevelopment commission, two council appointees aren’t necessary, Hill said.
Gibson said the message she had received from residents was that one council member serving on the redevelopment commission was plenty.
Myers, the mayor, said he is in favor of legislation that would require direct city council approval of any redevelopment commission spending, but other proposals that would replace one of his appointments with a school district appointee would be unfair and disruptive to economic development.
The problem, according to Myers, is that Greenwood has several school districts within its city limits. Having one school district represented at the expense of the others wouldn’t be fair, he said.
As the current legislation suggests giving the redevelopment commission membership to the school district with the most students in the city, the school district that gets represented may not be the one that is actually impacted the most by the city’s TIF districts, he said.
