Friday, August 17, 2012

Greenwood Proposes to Use TIF Dollars for "Wish List" of Projects

From the Johnson County Daily Journal:

A chunk of tax dollars that Greenwood had been using largely for road projects aimed at luring new businesses instead will go to a wish list of expenses, including new police cruisers and renovated office space at the airport.

Mayor Mark Myers presented a city board with a list of public safety and airport projects he thought should be paid for with property tax dollars, just days after the Greenwood City Council requested that the same board spend $10 million on a new swimming pool. Myers said he’d been planning the projects since January, that they were priorities he wanted to get taken care of first and that public safety was the top priority.

“These are the funding issues I strongly believe are right for the city,” he said. “Public safety is job number one.”

The redevelopment commission voted unanimously to approve about $1.1 million in new projects after questioning the spending. That money will go to pay debt on a fire truck that the city bought in 2005, buy nine new police cruisers, tear down an unused water tower about a mile from the Greenwood Municipal Airport, pay the city’s share of a runway expansion project and renovate an office attached to a hangar building at the airport that the city recently bought.

http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/local_story/Panel-OKs-tax-district-funds-f_1345178819/