4-8-02

On April 1, the City Council voted to set a public hearing to revise the City's Urban Revitalization Program. The public hearing will be conducted at the April 15 Council meeting.

The Council's goal is to change the program into a Housing Revitalization Program that would be limited to single family homes only.

The New Program. The revised program will only apply to one dwelling, single-family homes.

The benefits of the Housing Revitalization Program will provide a tax abatement for people who wish to either improve an existing home or build a new home.

However, the benefits of the program would be limited to the first $75,000 of new taxable value built on a property and would be limited to a period of 3 years. Any new value above that amount would be fully taxable. Any taxable value that was already on the tax rolls before the improvements were created would remain on the tax rolls.

In order to qualify for the program, the property owner would have to increase a property's taxable value by at least 10%.

These revisions greatly limit the benefits of the current program.

Why is a program like this important? Here are some reasons:

1.) In the case of existing housing, the City is trying to create an incentive that will encourage people to fix-up existing homes. In some cases, offering an incentive like this would go much further toward the Council's goal of improving buildings than would expanding the nuisance ordinance to include "sight nuisances" and issuing abatement orders.

2.) In the case of new houses, the City is looking to create an incentive that will lower a person's expenses for building a home and give them a reason to build in Maquoketa rather than somewhere else. It is important to remember that the first Family Dollar and Generac families that decide to build a home either here or elsewhere are Maquoketa's to loose.

3.) At a point in time when a future Council feels that our local housing industry has taken off again and no longer needs help for new construction, the borders of the housing revitalization area can be made smaller to include only the older parts of town, or the incentive can be totally dismantled.

In retrospect. The program that was started in January 2000 was a good attempt, but it didn't produce the results for which we had hoped. The program allowed almost every type of residential or commercial development to be qualified. In some cases, the incentive was perceived to disproportionately benefit some of our more well-to-do citizens. Or, it was seen as applying to projects that didn't need an incentive because they were probably going to be built anyway.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the current urban revitalization ordinance is that there weren't enough success stories that were caused by it.

But, by creating a "single family housing only" program with its 10% minimum improvement benchmark and its $75,000 cap, it is our hope that we can address the past perceptions that the current program is too difficult for working families to access and too much of a benefit for upper income people.

I think the program can be a truly good incentive for home construction and home rehabilitation if it is correctly tailored and promoted better.

And, if people can see that others like them can qualify and use the new program, I believe it will catch on.

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I was recently at a meeting in Dubuque. It was a regional meeting that was attended by representatives of several area communities.

At the beginning of the meeting, the introductory speaker mentioned that all of the towns that were in attendance were all a part of "Greater Dubuque." In fact, he stated that everywhere as far away as 50 miles from Dubuque was a part of "Greater Dubuque."

I wasn't aware of that. If I had been, I wouldn't have just had a bunch of new business cards printed that said I was from Maquoketa.

This had to be the type of declaration that only someone from Dubuque could make. As a resident of Maquoketa, I'm pretty sure that I'm never going to.

I wonder if what I thought at this meeting might have been similar to what the native people of this hemisphere thought when they heard that Columbus had discovered them and declared their land to be the property of Spain.

It had to be the type of declaration that only someone who worked for the ancient Spanish could make. I'm pretty sure that the ancient Indians weren't going to.