Shaver's dream
When Shaver made this promise that he couldn't fulfill the price tag came in at $18,000,000.
The $18,000,000 is the construction price. A levy has to be passed for the city residents to pay for it. The city does not have the borrowing capacity to borrow the money.
Then you have to operate the rec center. Remember with your lessons learned with our schools, you pass a construction levy then an operating levy and you always throw in a few frills to make the politicians look good.
Another option is to use membership fees to pay for the operations, however, you have to assure you have enough members to cover the operations cost. Next you move into membership costs. A city resident is paying for the construction cost for 15 or 20 years on the taxes. For simplicity, let?’s say that?’s $10 a year. Now if they pay an operating levy at $5 per year, they get free membership. So for $15 a year, they have almost unlimited access to the Rec Center.
Let?’s say that they use membership fees to pay for the operations. They?’re paying $10 a year for construction and $5 a year for membership. This is a risky road to go down because you need only one more vote than half voting to agree to build the thing. You probably cannot operate is on the income from the memberships of those voters.
Now let?’s factor in our neighbors in the township. They pay nothing for the construction. If an operating levy is paying for operations they pay nothing for that. So they have to pay a membership fee. Do we charge them an equivalent amount to what the city residents are paying in taxes? If we are paying $15 a year in taxes should their membership fee be $15?
Now let?’s look at more real numbers. If a city resident is paying $250 a year in increased taxes for construction and then has to pay a membership fee of $250 a year to belong, should we charge a non-city resident $500 for membership? None of the membership fee goes towards paying the debt of the construction, just towards operations.
Also remember, each year costs of operations will increase. We should expect membership fees to also increase. What if people decide that they can?’t afford it anymore? Membership, thus incoming revenue, decreases. Hence the level of services decreases, hours shortened, equipment not replaced and so on. Would a few down years cause us to have a big empty building that we cannot remarket? We?’d still be paying for it.
Let me throw this out there last. How would you think that the schools would feel if the city voters were forced to choose between a Rec Center and a new school? What if the choice was between a much needed operations levy and an operations levy for the Rec Center? The schools themselves essentially permanently divided the community in the disparity of the schools. Should the city jump on the bandwagon? Would we then brand every member of the Rec Center as anti-schools because the spent their money elsewhere.
On the surface, a Rec Center sound real good. Just spend a little time scratching below the surface.
