Divided city board okays $700k tax notes

The Clarendon Board of Aldermen voted 3-2 to authorize issuing $700,000 in tax revenue notes for water and sewer improvements during a called meeting Monday night.

The funds will be used to replace utility lines under several blocks of city streets that are scheduled to be repaved following a May bond election in which voters authorized borrowing a separate $700,000. The total project is now expected to cost about $1.4 million.

The streets were to have been paved this summer, but aldermen expressed concerns about the utility lines, causing City Administrator Lambert Little to come up with a plan to replace the lines. Little presented the project and the idea of using tax notes (a form of bonds that does not require voter approval) to pay for the extra work last Tuesday during the regular city meeting, but board members objected to issuing that much debt with citizen input.

As a result, the city held a town hall meeting Monday night at the Burton Memorial Library, which was attended by 17 citizens.

Little told the town hall that adding the water and sewer lines to the project would basically double the total cost of the job and would mean that the city would lose the window of opportunity for paving this season.

The administrator said the city could make the payments for both the bonds and the tax notes with its current 26-cent debt component of its ad valorem tax rate, and then there would be two years of balloon payments.

Payments the first five years would be about $140,000 each, and that would be followed by balloon payments totaling $420,000 in both 2018 and 2019.

Little said he anticipated paying down the notes early using sales of the city’s groundwater to Greenbelt Water Authority so that the balloon payments would not be an issue. And, he said, in the worst case scenario the city would refinance the debt in the last two years to stretch the payments out.

Citizens asked a range of questions about the project and the financing. Former alderman David Pitts said paving the streets without doing the utility work would be like building a house with no foundation but he expressed dismay that the utility lines were not included in the original scope of work presented to voters.

Billie Shaffer encouraged aldermen to “do it right the first time” so that the city will hopefully “save money in the long run.”

Blake Osburn and others asked several questions about what will be done regarding paving the roads, especially with regards to selection of contractors, who will do the base work, and who will check the base density.

Following the town hall meeting, aldermen met in a called session and voted unanimously to dedicate 100 percent of the revenue from groundwater sales to Greenbelt to the repayment of the tax note debt, and then voted 3-2 to issue the debt. (Aldermen Will Thompson, Terry Noble, and Abby Patten in favor, and Aldermen Tommy Hill and Jesus Hernandez opposed.)

In other city business, the board met in regular session August 14 where they discussed the budget for the coming fiscal year and approved a request from Mullins Music Ministry for $2,700 from the Hotel Occupancy Fund for a Thanksgiving Jamboree. Mullins told the board that he had an estimated 150 people at his last jamboree earlier this year which the city had provided $2,100 for and he said he knew for sure that three people had stayed in the local hotel.