Residents that have been considering a home improvement project might have a reason to pull the trigger soon.
City officials spoke to the Marysville Finance Committee on Thursday about a counterpart to the city’s sidewalk repair reimbursement program that would help fund home improvement projects.
According to a fact sheet on the city’s website, the sidewalk program offers residents a 50 percent reimbursement up to $1,500 for sidewalk repairs on their property. The new program would reimburse residents for 50 percent up to $2,000 on front-facing home repairs.
“As we’re entering our bicentennial year, I think it would be nice to offer some incentives here for people to spruce up a little bit,” said City Manager Terry Emery.
The fund the city would draw from would be $15,000 altogether, same as the sidewalk fund.
“I think there’s going to be a really strong demand for this,” said City Finance Director Justin Nahvi.
Nahvi expressed concern about the eligibility of city employees.
“I don’t know how that’s going to be look upon if city employees are the first to know about it and they eat up all the money,” he said.
Officials said there are no restrictions in place for the sidewalk fund.
Committee member Mark Reams suggested a six-month waiting period for city employees before they can apply for the funding. Committee Chair Henk Berbee said one solution might be limiting the number city employee applications accepted.
Reams also said he’d prefer if residents within the historic preservation district came before the city’s design review board with their improvements to be eligible. He said a resident in that area wants to do an improvement without city funding, they don’t need to come to the city.
“If they want to use this program, I think they should go to design review so that what we’re funding (is appropriate),” he said.
Emery said he would look at that possibility. The program will come back to the committee next month for further discussion.
The committee also heard a request from the Union County Airport Authority to take a parcel out of the Colemans Crossing TIF.
Nahvi said the property in questions is, “The big plot of vacant land across from Crazy Burrito.”
The county purchased the land to clear a flight path onto the runway. Nahvi said the taxes on the land come out to about $15,000 per year, and the airport authority was recently denied a tax exemption on the property.
The denial stems from the property being within the area of a TIF, so the county is asking for the land to be taken out. Nahvi said if land were taken out of the TIF or given a tax exemption, it would eliminate about $240,000 in tax revenue through 2034.
Reams spoke against the request.
“The whole point in setting up that district was to fund that infrastructure,” Reams said. “If you take that out of it, that doesn’t make sense.”
Both Burbee and Reams were against the request. Nahvi said he’d speak to the airport authority about the decision.
“I’ll let (them) know,” he said.