Improvement District On Agenda
The BID is back. Again.
The future of the Business Improvement District - subject of a months-long Spokane City Council debate - is back on the council’s agenda tonight.
It was deferred, along with many other items, from last week’s council meeting even after the council spent 90 minutes discussing it.
The decision that stalled the council was whether to pass the district’s assessment roll for 12 months, as BID board members have urged, or for six months, as Councilman Steve Eugster wants.
Eugster has been aggressively trying to reform the BID, an entity created by state law to tax downtown business and property owners in exchange for services.
While BID board members have agreed to make changes, they hoped to have all of 2001 to first get the approval of their ratepayers and then make the changes. Eugster, however, believes it can be done in six months.
When the council voted to amend the ordinance that creates the assessment roll for 12 months and change it to six, it split 3-3, with Mayor John Talbott abstaining. The council then voted to defer, in part because of the lateness of the hour.
Eugster has taken the BID to task for engaging in activities beyond what the law allows, such as economic development, and for not being able to prove to its ratepayers that they get fair value for their money.
“You cannot say that a business person putting in a dollar is getting a dollar’s worth out of it, and I think you have to be able to see it,” Eugster said at Monday’s meeting.
Eugster is a downtown property owner who once sued the BID and pays his BID assessment under protest.
“I haven’t seen a return (on the assessment) at all,” he said. “I clean my own sidewalk.”
Comments like that are cited by some other council members as evidence that Eugster’s complaints with the BID are personal and not widely shared by its ratepayers.
“Steve, you could not get three or four other people in the boat with you to support it,” Councilman Rob Higgins said at Monday’s meting. “This is obviously a personal issue with you. I sit here month after month and do not hear the slightest opposition to the BID. You certainly don’t have the support of the people.”
But Councilman Steve Corker said Thursday that more BID ratepayers are dissatisfied with the organization than it appears.
“There are a lot of people who are afraid to complain,” Corker said. “Oftentimes an individual in this community is afraid to challenge the traditional way of thinking for fear of personal and economic repercussions. I’ve had six or seven people comment to me that their payments aren’t commensurate to the services they receive.”
The BID is committed to change, just not on Eugster’s timetable, said Mike Edwards, president of the Downtown Spokane partnership, which administers the BID.
“What we want to do and what the city wants to do is similar,” Edwards said. “Our responsibility is that we do it in the most appropriate and professional way possible.”