03/10/2008 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Special Council Meeting 3-10-08 Page 10 reduce your expenses in light of the fact that perhaps revenues may be down over the next five years. It may not be down dramatically to the point where Progressive leaves, but you have to look at it and say what if revenues do go down 5% every year for the next three or four years. Mayor Rinker asked how this year we are not showing where we are reducing. The big gorilla in this room is what we do with the police station. Beyond that we are trying to trim back. With departments we are looking at where in ter-rns of any scheduling we thinlc that there is "fat" just to make sure that we are not being extravagant. Mayor Rinker does not think that we have been, but these are all areas that we are looking at pretty carefully. We have looked at reducing where we put money into projects. We have looked much more critically at land. The fact of the matter is most of what you see, the assets that we build up over the years that are reflected in this debt are investments within the infrastructure of the community between land and physical in order to solidify our physical plant for many years to come. It just does not happen overnight. A lot of the investment is something that we have stretched out over a long period of time that reflects this debt. It is not like we axe just going along and spending money hand over fist with no plan in mind. This is something we have discussed every year year in and yeax out. We have looked very carefully collectively at these things. The way in which we have looked at underwriting a lot of it has not only been thoughtful but really quite creative. There are items here and there. Last year people got very sensitive when we talked about the undeipass even though the discussion came up after Council had already looked at it and approved it. What brought it into highlight is when we came across $600,000 in Metropark and Zorn. You look at some of the major expenditures we have made and how we have done those infrastructure projects. We have not gone the conventional route of assessing residents. There is a certain amount of a loss leader mentality that we have had where we have fronted substantial sums of money so that residents can enjoy the benefits of all of these improvements. Just look at Metropark and Zorn alone. We never got Issue II funding for that like we did with Worton Park and we did with SOM with the trunk sewer. We are looking at Robley, Thornapple with the pump with the County because we think there is going to be a fair amount of underwriting there that would not be something we would be fronting the same kind of dollars. We have always looked at partnering but most of these moneys Council decided to spend $5-600,000.00 on a fire truck two years ago. That was a straight cash deal basically. Property like Stabile we are carrying the debt, but we looked at options of whether we would do this over time. A lot of these things we have looked at on an individual basis. We have tried to look at the individual merits pretty thoughtfully. It positions us in many ways where the redevelopment strategies will focus on the commercial areas and the other areas that we have pretty much controlled in the Village name in terms of land use are pretty significant. A lot of this is we have created a foundation for how future decisions would be made. Mayor Rinker will not pretend that we have not incurred a debt here. The overall risk is these are investments that we have been putting into the community. They are hard investments. A lot of the revenue stream that pays for the debt service is incurred through the value of those properties. A lot of this value is based upon the decisions we have made that have drastically improved it. Look at the land value alone. Look at the Costanzo property. The land value there is easily for 8 acres probably close to $1.5 million an acre. For land that 15-20 years ago if you