2002-08-26 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Session 1850 August 26, 2002 markets are very favorable right now and it would be beneficial for the City to proceed. He believed we need to move forward. Mr. Ollendorff said that this is the next step in meeting the needs of the kids of University City. The Council started this process nine or ten years ago. It included several pieces that the Council, with a lot of citizen input, put together. Many people helped in putting the current plan together, as well. The question should not be why do this now and let's put it off. It should be why we didn't do this sooner. The Council had the plan and was ready to move ahead a year ago and in response to many citizen requests, including a petition several months ago signed by several hundred advocates of this plan. We said that this November was when we were going to do this. A few of them called a couple of days ago, wanting to go to work on this campaign. Mr. Ollendorff told them that they would not go ahead until the Council vote this evening. These citizens did not like the idea that their children's facilities would be put on the backburner again. It will be relatively cheap to put this issue on the ballot in November since we will be sharing the ballot with many other jurisdictions. An April ballot will cost us $25,000. Another reason to move ahead is to take advantage of the historically Iow interest rates. Mr. Ollendorff personally took full responsibility for fully informing the voters on how we intend to use this money between now and November. If the voters vote it down, he promised it will not be because they were not informed. Ms. Welsch does not feel she is putting the people and children of University City on the backburner. She stated she is trying to consider, not only the children of the next few years, but of the next five, ten, twenty-five years. She did think that we have the question of the Community Center coming up that the staff will be dealing with and these concerns need to be considered in the design of the recreation facility. She truly felt that many people did not get a say on the design. If there was any way to say that the money would go for the pool and not for the recreation center, then she would vote for it. She did not see how this can be done. Mr. Lieberman stated that Mr. Ollendorff expects to sell this to the public. But again, he did not see any opportunity for any additional citizen input. He believed that we are just exposing them to what we hope to do. There will be some resentment without an opportunity for input. Residents will think we are jamming something down their throats and may leave a very bad mark on this project. Mayor Adams said that the interest rates for bonds based on sales tax or property taxes are quite slight and aren't worth the argument. Mayor Adams asked what the Council wished to call the proposition. The sense of the Council was to call the proposition K for kids.