Public Works Director Dan Smith is among city of Springfield employees working to develop a package for residents to review two tax renewals scheduled to hit the ballot next year.
Speaking this morning from Hilton Garden Inn as Springfield Business Journal’s 12 People You Need to Know guest, Smith said the city’s eighth-cent transportation fund and quarter-cent capital improvements plan taxes both expire next year, the first time they’ve both been up for renewal at the same time since 2004. At stake is millions of dollars for Springfield’s infrastructure maintenance and construction services.
“When we invest in our local infrastructure, we make people’s lives better. When you go to a ballgame, you go to work, you go buy groceries, you go and you live your life, we’re providing the infrastructure that people need to do the things they want to do,” Smith said. “If it’s working well, typically no one notices.
“We like it when they don’t notice it, because that means we’re doing a good job, but that also means we need to remind the importance of having that infrastructure in place.”
Introduced in 1989, the quarter-cent tax contributes $10 million a year to Public Works and is renewable every three years, while the eighth-cent tax - which started in 1996 - brings in $5 million a year and is renewable every four years, Smith said. With the taxes coming due in the same year, he said the city is exploring the opportunity to consolidate the benefits of both in a comprehensive package to appeal to local stakeholders. The city is targeting the April election.
“If we don’t do a good enough job of communicating the importance to the community of how each of these taxes brings value to people’s lives, I think that’s really the biggest road block,” he said.
Smith said it’s important to keep dollars coming in after the Missouri Department of Transportation last year suspended its cost-share program. Through that initiative, the city had received an additional $3 million a year on average.
Projects funded through the program include the diverging diamond underway at Battlefield Road and U.S. Highway 65, as well as the upcoming railway bypass on West Chestnut Expressway. Still, Smith said the loss of the cost-share program could represent an opportunity for the city.
“We have so often taken our quarter-cent revenues and leveraged those cost-share projects. With that being gone, really this is an opportunity to focus more on Springfield streets, which we’ve not gotten to do as much of,” he said. “It won’t be as many dollars, yet we may be able to put them in a place that has been needed for a long time and we just haven’t been able to get there yet.”
Smith said the city currently is working to gather resident input on needed projects across Springfield.
“That communication is so critical to let people know that they’re getting the value they voted for,” he said.
