Jasper Common Council votes to sell ten acres to Jasper School Corp

The Jasper City Council approved outright selling ten acres of The Parklands to the Greater Jasper School Corporation.

They met Wednesday night and held a discussion on the Redevelopment Commission’s recommendation to enter into a purchase option agreement with the Greater Jasper School Corporation on 10 acres of the former golf course property.

It was made known that the Greater Jasper School Board of Trustees would prefer an outright purchase of the land, rather than the option to purchase with a 10 year time period.

The council is of the same mindset, that an agreement to make the purchase now is preferred because the city will recoup money from the sale that would go back into the Rainy Day Fund, from which the purchase of the property was made.

The council also learned that the Redevelopment Commission has the authority to sell the property without an approval vote from the council, as long as they have a budget, according to City Attorney Renee Kabrick.

However, the council agreed that the best course of action would be to work together on a solution rather than take a adversarial stance with the Redevelopment Commission. Mayor Seitz said that the back and forth between the two organizations is actually a healthy thing.

“This is just an education thing. I think both parties need to realize, certainly we have elected officials, we have appointed officials, we have redevelopment, we have council,” he explained, “but ultimately it’s all about Jasper and using new tools; talking about things, TIF districts, the possibility of using that. Things that we have never done in Jasper.

In the end the council decided that the best course of action would be to offer the land for sale to the school board, in spite of the verbal agreement by the Redevelopment Commission to offer a purchase option.

After the long discussion, council member Randy Buchta made a motion to offer to sell the property rather than execute a purchase option and Earl Schmitt seconded. The council passed the motion unanimously.

Also in the meeting, Gary Malone, partner with Umbaugh and Associates made a presentation to the city on funding options for the Downtown and Riverfront Master Plan.

The City has a smorgasbord of options to examine to help provide direction for the plans. Malone pointed out, though, that there is no one-size-fits-all way to go about the process. He said that the funding paths are as diverse as the communities that work through them.

Finally, Mayor Seitz announced the city learned it was not one of the six finalists in the Stellar Communities Grant program, Wednesday.

He made a statement to the Council and public about the program:

At this time I wish to offer my gratitude to the team of staff members and outside professionals who assisted the City of Jasper in its letter of interest in the State of Indiana’s Stellar Community Program. Over the course of several weeks, and by my estimate at least a hundred hours of time we created a document which directly responded to expectations provided to us by State Officials over the last year. We built upon our existing Downtown and Riverfront Master Plan and in my opinion our effort was indeed, stellar. Late this afternoon we learned from local media reports that Jasper was not one of the six communities named as stellar finalist. Our neighbor, Huntingburg, was selected to move to the next step in this competition and I congratulate Mayor Spinner and his team. While we should take a few moments to step back and reflect, we will immediately move forward with the work at hand. The good news is the work that was done to prepare the stellar letter of interest is work we would have already done in the next step with the – just at least – the downtown work. In doing so we will acknowledge the strengths of our community…thank-you very much.