Danville City Council members have voted to use an estimated $800-thousand dollars in city sales tax revenues for storm and sanitary improvements instead of demolitions. The council earlier approved hiking the sales tax to pay for more demolitions. There will still be approximately $800-thousand dollars going to remove blight.
Some council members balked at the transfer, noting taxpayers were promised earlier that all of the money would go toward demolitions. Mayor Scott Eisenhauer says storm water, though, is an issue that also needs to be addressed. ‘’Look this isn’t a plan anybody likes. But where we are financially we have to figure out how to use the existing revenue sources that we have available to us, and spend that money so that we can accomplish as many projects – solving as many challenges that we have as possible,’’ said the Mayor.
Vice Mayor Brenda Brown, and aldermen Rickey Williams Jr. and Sharon Pickering voted against moving the funds. Two other council members – Reverend R. J. Davis and Rick Strebing – were absent.
Mayor Eisenhauer applauded the council’s decision to provide funding to help address the storm water issues. ‘’There’s no question the blight is a challenge in this community (and) we want to remove it. There’s no question that storm water is a challenge in this community,’’ said Mayor Eisenhauer. ‘’Certainly ask anybody whose home floods on a regular basis during a storm water event. And so we have to figure out a way to fund that. We don’t have the ability to go out and ask the taxpayers to pay more to fund fully either one of those programs, but what the council decided to do tonight was take an existing source (and) split that in half so that we’re at least doing some demolition and some storm water management.’’
Vice Mayor Brown said she would rather see all of the funds go toward fighting blight.
Despite the fund shift the Danville City Council is still wrestling with a projected $2.2 million dollar deficit in next year’s budget.
