Letter: New tax district cause for concern
On December 17th, the Jasper common council will come together to discuss TIFs and to be fair, most of us have no clue what a TIF is.
Simply put, when a TIF is put in place over a certain piece of land, it takes all the new property tax revenue and redirects it to a different government entity called a Redevelopment Commission. This means, from within the TIF, all future new tax revenue from the Greater Jasper School Corp., the Jasper Library, Bainbridge Township, the city of Jasper, and all county government entities is redirected to the TIF fund.
While this was set up to address blight and give cities more speed to act, there are certain issues with the process you need to be aware of.
TIFs are operated by the Redevelopment Commission which is a five member board that is appointed yearly and must have one council member.
In Jasper, the mayor appoints three out of the five members. By State law, they are not bound to the will of the common council and do not have to follow the spending laws governing local governments either. This last point is fairly critical as they don’t have to abide by the rules governing the appraisal and bidding processes. They can spend as much as they want, on whatever they want.
The dominate power the commission has is the ability to bond off of the TIF. The bond authority comes without citizen referendum and deprives us our voting rights to approve or disapprove the bond. This is one reason they are gaining such popularity with local governments throughout Indiana.
If you take the power to bond without referendum, with the lack of local government spending limits, to the fact that 4 of the 5 members are unelected, you have a bad situation. This isn’t about the people involved, but the state legislation that gave us TIFs and the Redevelopment Commission that has many dangerous loopholes.
Based on this, I oppose TIFs in Jasper or in Dubois County. All county residents need to form an opinion and have it heard too.
Adrian Engelberth
Jasper, IN
