Baldwin City Council tables scheduling sales tax refendum for community center as search for private funding continues

The on-again, off-again referendum that would ask Baldwin City voters to approve a half-cent sales tax to help finance a community center is now in limbo.

The Baldwin City Council agreed Tuesday to table any discussion of an ordinance to place the referendum on the Nov. 7 ballot until Aug. 15. The delay would give Baldwin City Recreation Commission Executive Director Steve Friend the time he needs to secure private sector money needed to make the project viable. Friend requested the council table an ordinance on its agenda scheduling the referendum for Nov. 7 until he learned if private money would be available.

“I’m still talking with a private donor,” he told the council. “I’m not ready to give up on that.”

If approved, the sales tax would provide an estimated $202,000 annually to help pay off a 25-year bond issue to build the community center.

Earlier this month, the council canceled a planned Aug. 1 referendum on the sales tax. That action followed the Baldwin City school board’s denial last month of a BCRC request for an additional 1 mill of taxing authority. The added mill would have provided $75,000 a year to help pay off bonds issued for the community center. It is that revenue Friend is now seeking to replace with private donations.

Also tabled was Mayor Marilyn Pearse’s nomination of Shane Starkey to fill the unexpired term of Steve Bauer on the City Council. Bauer and his wife, Alison, were killed last month in a car accident.

Pearse said she selected Starkey because he was a good fit for the council and had the experience to contribute immediately. Starkey served on the council from 2011 to 2015. He ran for re-election in 2015, but finished fourth in the election that saw Bauer, Tony Brown and Dave Simmons elected to the three available council seats.

Simmons asked Tuesday that the nomination be tabled until the council’s July 5 meeting. In doing so, he raised his familiar objection to voting on measures that had not been presented for the council’s consideration at the previous meeting. Residents deserved the opportunity to learn of the nomination and comment on it, he said. Councilwomen Christi Darnell and Kathy Gerstner supported the delay.

Starkey filed last month to run for City Council this election cycle. Should he be appointed to the unexpired term, which expires in December 2019, he would still be one of six candidates on the November general election ballot contending for the two open City Council seats.

Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said Wednesday the Legislature in 2015 closed loopholes allowing candidates to withdraw from an election after the official filing/withdraw deadline, which was June 1 for this election cycle.

“I’m checking to see if there is a way his name can be removed from the ballot,” he said. “I just don’t think there is.”

Should Starkey be appointed and then elected to one of the open seats, he would have to resign from either his appointed or elected position, Shew said.

“He couldn’t hold both,” Shew said.

In other business, the council scheduled a public hearing for July 5 on a proposed benefit district, which would help fund improvements to First Street from State Lake Road to the north city limits. The street serves as eastern city limits in northeast Baldwin City.

During a February work session on the benefit district, City Administrator Glenn Rodden said the section of First Street should have been paved as a condition of the development of the large-lot subdivision to its west. Had that been the case, the cost of the road would have been passed on to the subdivision’s homeowners.

The city, Douglas County and Palmyra Township are now willing to pay for 70 percent of the street’s estimated $430,000 improvement, but would ask seven homeowners in the subdivision to pay for the remaining 30 percent through a benefit district, Rodden said. The work would be done in 2019.

Pearse said the public hearing would allow the residents to make their views known on getting the road improvements through a benefit district or ending all consideration of the project.