Council rejects resolution establishing limits on PIF waivers

Tuesday, January 10 2012 07:05

Paul Wallem

City Councilman Everett Boss disagreed with the idea of a resolution that established eligibility limits for projects to receive PIF waivers, saying the current process has worked well over the years. BRN photo by Nathan Kobielusz.

The Gillette City Council decided against limiting their ability to grant PIF (plant investment fees) waivers to only low-income housing projects during Monday night’s city council workshop.

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Over the last several years, the Gillette City Council waived plant investment fees for a myriad of projects, including low-income housing, government projects, and nonprofit projects.

A resolution introduced and subsequently tabled in November would have prohibited the city council from granting PIF waivers for government and nonprofit projects.

During the workshop, representatives from the Campbell County Chamber of Commerce urged city council members to maintain their flexibility in granting PIF waivers by not handcuffing themselves with the proposed resolution.

Likewise, Councilman Everett Boss says the status quo has served the council well in this regard.

“Why even have a resolution? We’ve been working without one for all these years and it’s been working just fine,” Boss stated.

According to city administrator Carter Napier, over the last five years the waivers have added up to $1.17 million.

Napier disagreed with Boss that the current process has worked fine over the last several years. “By council’s own admission, the council was not aware that they had spent $1.2 million in five years on a program that had largely no management to it,” Napier says.

Nevertheless, Boss believes each and every one of those projects that received waivers over the last five years were great for the community. Boss also contends that any resolution could just be modified again at a later point, which brings him back to his original question of why a resolution is needed in the first place.

“We can go in and take this resolution as it’s written and six months down the line say, ‘We don’t want to do nonprofits anymore so we’ll take that out and write a new resolution.’”

Boss continued, “Why do this? We’ve been taking each one under consideration every year and we have the choice, and that’s why the voters elected us to do this job. I don’t think we need to be turning this over to staff.”

Napier says the city’s staff felt a resolution could bring some type of management to an overall process that adds up to a considerable fee on taxpayers.

“So staff was interested in trying to introduce something that would provide council the opportunity to exercise some management over a fairly significant expense – an expense by the way that is aimed at removing the expense from projects that are not city-related,” Napier explains. “So in other words, for a developer to come forward and identify a plant investment fee as a cost of doing the project, council is effectively volunteering to pay that cost on behalf of the project.”

As city administrator, Napier says he would not be doing his job effectively if he didn’t point out what he sees as problems left unchecked.

“I’m not really used to the concept of not having some management over an expense that could mean as much as $535,000 in one year, and so that was our concern,” he says.

City Councilwoman Louise Carter-King understood Napier’s concern.

“I can kind of see when I look at some of these projects, like the hospital parking garage, all we were doing was taking money from our coffers that we collect and giving it to the hospital," Carter-King says. "So some of these cases he makes a lot of sense because they’re still going to build the parking garage, all we did is help them out when really I don’t think we ever went to the hospital to say, ‘How about helping us with one of our projects.’”

She concluded by saying whether or not the council ended up passing the resolution, they need to take a closer look at what they’re waiving.

In the end, the council decided against renewing consideration of this resolution that would have established eligibility limits for projects to receive the waivers.

The following is a list of the projects the city council waived fees for over the last five years, divided into three separate categories: