The city council unanimously approved an ordinance that moved $900,000 from a gas line fund to an account to build a Multi-Use Community Recreation Center at its July 22 meeting last week.
That’s in addition to another $400,000 councilmembers set aside in adjustments to the city’s capital budget last month.
But not everyone is happy about the move. Former city council member Heath Smith said the funds that would go toward the project should go directly to residents instead of a rec center at a public hearing on June 17.
“This is not tax revenue. They're not fees that the city's collected. It's not a gift. It's not a grant. These are funds that belong to the participants of that build out, he said, “and so I would encourage the council to go through the reimbursement process of getting that money back to the folks.”
The money from the rec center came from the gas line fund, which is made up of money from residents paying to connect their houses to the natural gas line and a free main allowance. The city manages the allowance, which is a refund from Enstar to the utility users.
The council’s discussed building a rec center for years. It’s near the top of the city’s priority list of capital improvement projects. While there are no solid plans on building the rec center, the ordinance states the funding “confirms the City Council’s strong interest in the project.”
Mayor Ken Castner sponsored the ordinance. He said most of the allowance went away when paying back debt to create the gas line, and that it would be difficult to split up the fund to pay back residents.
“It's going to be a very, very cumbersome process in order to divide this pie up. At the same time, the thought was that if we did a general purpose, sort of an application of it, that that would be an acceptable thing,” he said at the same June 17 meeting.
According to a memorandum from the city’s finance department, the fund had about $1.2 million dollars at the end of June. If it was distributed to residents, each parcel of land in the district would be refunded about $316.
Council Member Rachel Lord brought up that the original ordinance would put money in a reserve for the Homer Education and Recreation Center, or HERC. That’s part of why the ordinance was amended to put the funds toward a specific account for a new rec center instead.
“I think that where it's slated to go per this ordinance, as written, is inappropriate, because it is not the intent of this council, I do not believe, to put money into the HERC reserve, which would be then available for putting a new roof on doing a demolition project, like whatever is going to need to happen,” Lord said.
The HERC building has been used in the past as a temporary office space for city departments that were remodeled. The gym is currently used as a recreation space. The city has considered demolishing and rebuilding the HERC, but hazardous materials would make any way of doing that extremely expensive.
Council member Donna Aderhold supported this change, but cautioned against having specific plans for the money.
“I think that we need to be careful about restricting this too far, because we don't have land for a new building yet,” she said, “and we have some conceptual ideas of what that building might look like, as a, you know, bare bones building. But we don't know, we don't know what the building would look like.”
The council has looked at several potential locations for a new rec center last October, but members haven’t made any decisions about where the center will be or what will be built.
