City Council Minutes 2019 05 21 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

City Council Meeting Minutes May 21 2019 Page 6 of 14 opportunity to buy a property, landmark it, and then be able to sell it. We should have a ranked list for what we want to buy similar to how we rank open space properties. Mayor Muckle agreed with Councilmember Stolzmann We are ready for the program to be bold and aggressive, the worst outcome is to landmark more structures. Councilmember Maloney stated we do want to be more aggressive. We have a finite number of historic structure and we want to preserve as many as possible He supports the changes for higher levels of grants to get people interested He feels the loan rate is fine as proposed He will support it as written Mayor Muckle agreed Councilmember Loo stated this is just a slush fund A $10K incentive is much too high if there is no requirement to use it on the structure She cannot support it with that in the resolution Councilmember Loo agreed below prime for the loan is good, but 3% is too much We should target properties we want to save to make sure we have enough funding to cover those This is way too generous a program for using tax -payer money Councilmember Leh stated he shares the concern about how aggressive this is however the taxpayers of town have said they want this. The HPC put a great deal of effort into this with a lot of thoughtful work. He wonders if there is a reason to be less aggressive to keep more money in the fund He is not as concerned about the 10K incentive and it doesn't need to be tied to work. It is not likely to lead to a rush on the fund Inclined to support it as written Mayor Muckle moved to approve Resolution No 17, Series 2019, Councilmember Stolzmann seconded Discussion of motion Mayor Pro Tem Lipton felt it is important to stimulate reinvestment in this area to keep the homes and buildings from being functionally obsolete, but this is too aggressive. He is fine with HSA and with the landmark incentive, but would prefer using smaller increases to start with so as not to give too much Just give enough to stimulate more interest if that doesn't work we can increase again in a few years. It is a hard sell to those who live in newer homes and don't have access to these funds He stated he can't approve it as written, but is interested in some changes. Councilmember Stolzmann asked Mayor Pro Tem Lipton what levels he would support. Mayor Pro Tem Lipton stated he would need to go line by line to look at each grant. Mayor Muckle stated he would like to have the problem that we are spending more money or we are using it too fast. He would like to have the problem of more people landmarking He prefers aggressive now than the other way around