June 11, 2005
Does this seem right to YOU?
Yesterday I found out that a good friend of mine who is a teacher at South Haven schools was pink-slipped. We are laying off teachers. Yes, after how many millage proposals this faithful town passed in the last few years? We are laying off teachers, still.
The DDA captures between $300,000 and $400,000 annually in school taxes.
Yes, from South Haven city schools, Van Buren county schools, state schools and Lake Michigan College.
All this brou-ha-ha over the do-or-die importance of getting $400,000 for Indiana School, and the DDA absconds with nearly that much *annually* from school property taxes.
Though the state is supposed to reimburse these captured taxes dollar for dollar, audits show that there are shortfalls. This year the audit from LDFA tax capture of school funds has a shortfall of about $110,000. (Is that about a teacher and a half or so?) I don't know what the DDA audit shows.
This year, the TOTAL property tax capture going directly to DDA is $895,000. The *projected* tax revenue capture for DDA for the rest of the decade rises to $1 million+ per year. And that's considered a
conservative estimate, with the unknowns being the captured taxes generated by the massive PUDs planned.
No citizen has ever voted for these dollars to go this way.
The other entities getting short-changed out of the general fund are street repairs, senior services, the library, the hospital and drug enforcement. Taxes captured from the county schools and college also are lost to them.
While the DDA does serve some valuable projects to revitalize the downtown, other choices made by its Board seem self-serving to private merchant properties. Certainly the proposal to spend millions on billboards and media marketing is outrageous. And certainly tearing out mature evergreen screen and paving the rear portion of Dyckman Park to expose visions of parking lots and stores is not in the interest of citizens who love the beauty of our town.
Recently the DDA voted DOWN a proposal to donate for landscaping at The South Haven Center for the Arts. They further voted down a proposal to simply *study* the possibility of donating money to landscape the Center for Arts. This is not connected to the love of green space, the education of children or the benefit of the community.
The DDA is mandated by state law to be downtown, commercial and "blighted". The theory is that investment and work is supposed to pay off in *earned* future earnings through TIF for the DDA. The 2001 annexation to the DDA TIF district of huge portions of prime residential development properties on the lake and the river is designed to take tax dollars with little or nothing invested in earning them. It's a rip-off.
Demands on city services will increase as these huge condo developments are built, but the millions of tax dollars generated are diverted to the whim of 8 DDA Board members and the City Council's reliable rubber stamp.
Does this seem right to you?
Posted by Elaine at June 11, 2005 07:01 AM