Concord officials are expecting a surplus from fiscal year 2016, and part of the money could offset the tax impact of the planned Heights Community Center.
At Monday’s meeting, City Manager Tom Aspell will ask the Concord City Council to use unexpected revenue to ease the burden of the renovation at the former Dame School on Canterbury Road. In April, the council agreed to spend $6.5 million on a 30,000-square-foot community center, which will include a high school-sized gymnasium, three multipurpose rooms, a large function hall with a kitchen, exercise rooms and space for senior programming. The building will likely open next year.
The council weighed the design for years, cringing at price estimates as high as $17 million. Even when the group okayed a cheaper plan, the price tag was hard to swallow.
In fiscal year 2018, taxpayers would start feeling the pressure of debt service payments on that bond. Because the community center will not generate enough revenue to cover its own costs, residents will also start paying for its operating expenses in their tax bills that year. Earlier this year, city staff estimated the impact on the payments for a $200,000 home would be $33.
“It’s hard spending that kind of money, and I hope they appreciate that balance we tried to find,” Ward 8 Councilor Gail Matson said at the time. “That’s balancing the want and the need.”
But as fiscal 2016 comes to a close, Aspell said the city has extra cash to spend – at least $650,000. About $530,000 would come from unanticipated revenue; that money comes from ambulance service charges and a worker’s compensation “premium holiday,” when premiums are briefly waived. About $120,000 would come from unused dollars for snow plowing and ice control.
So Aspell has proposed using that money to offset the community center’s costs in each of the three years – fiscal 2018, 2019 and 2020. The figure would decline each year, easing taxpayers into the community center’s full burden. If the council approves that plan, he wasn’t sure what the new tax rate impact would be.
“The community won’t feel the impacts of those immediately,” Aspell said. “So it’s not all at once.”
And there could be more to come, though Aspell couldn’t say yet what the total surplus will be.
“This isn’t the full surplus,” Aspell said. “We’ll be back when we finally close the books.”
The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. Monday in council chambers.
(Megan Doyle can be reached at 369-3321, mdoyle@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @megan_e_doyle.)