By Ketul PatelThe Daily Northwestern
The Evanston City Council voted to use revenue from a Northwestern gift to Evanston to provide taxpayers with some relief.
The council voted during a Monday night meeting to amend the proposed city budget to use half a million dollars from an expected $1,050,000 from NU as revenue.
NU promised in December 2004 to pay the city three yearly installments of $350,000. NU intended to partially compensate the city after the university bought a property at 1800 Sherman Ave., which took the land off of the city’s tax rolls.
So far, the city has received $700,000 from the university.
The proposal passed by a 5-4 vote. Alds. Edmund Moran (6th), Elizabeth Tisdahl (7th), Cheryl Wollin (1st) and Melissa Wynne (3rd) voted against the measure.
Ald. Lionel Jean-Baptiste (2nd) said this move would help relieve the tax burden on Evanston residents.
But Wynne called these payments a “one-time revenue.” She said using this money in the budget would be unfair to the taxpayers because the city would have to raise taxes again once the city no longer had this revenue. She also estimated the move would decrease an $8,000 property tax bill by only $48.
“Next year, we will have the same set of expenses, so we will have to raise the taxes,” she said. “We won’t have the million dollars to make up for that. So you give them relief and will not have that again the next year.”
But Jean-Baptiste said the tax bills would fluctuate from year to year.
“When you have money paid as tax, why can’t we use that money to offset taxes,” he said. “We levy taxes year by year. The $48 I’m paying this year … may go up and may go down from year to year.”
Wynne recommended that the money be earmarked for specific projects to avoid interest. Moran agreed, saying the city would have to issue bonds and the interest from the bonds would cost $614,000 over 20 years.
But Ald. Steven Bernstein (4th) said the cost would average out to $30,700 a year with about 74,000 residents. That would be about 41 cents per resident each year.
The debate about the money from NU was part of the council’s effort to develop a budget for the 2007-08 fiscal year. The council must pass the budget by the end of this month, and it will go into effect on March 1.
The city faces a deficit of about $3 million for this year. The budget attempts to fix that deficit, said Matt Grady, the director of finance.
The total operating budget proposed by City Manager Julia Carroll was $186,769,007, representing a 0.26 percent increase from the 2006-07 budget. This increase is the lowest increase in the overall budget for at least the past 10 years, Carroll said in a Jan. 6 meeting.
Aldermen also decided Monday to put a yard waste sticker charge on the property taxes. In its Jan. 31 meeting, the council had voted to put a $1.28 increase in the sanitation charge and add it to the property taxes. But aldermen decided Monday to move the $1.28 to the water bill to add onto an existing $3.72 sanitation fee on the water bill.
These changes in the proposed budget would increase the property tax bills by $61.56 on an $8,000 property tax bill, according to city estimates. The original proposed budget would have increased the tax by $86.31 .
The changes passed by a 5-4 vote. Alds. Bernstein, Anjana Hansen (9th), Ann Rainey (8th) and Wollin voted against them.
“By charging our citizens on their water bill for the excess in garbage costs, we don’t spread that cost across the whole community,” Rainey said. “The whole community has to value garbage collection. You have tens of thousands of people paying $300,000 on the tax bill. I think that is an unnecessary fee for a necessary service.”
Moran said the yard waste stickers were unpopular in the past.
“I am harkening back to when we had this program when we bought bags and or stickers,” Moran said. “I was constantly in the line at Dominick’s and somebody was checking out and there was a sense that we were nickel-and-diming people. I just as soon would prefer not to go back to that era.”
Reach Ketul Patel at [email protected].
