Rough roads
Norris weighs property tax increase for street repairs
The Norris City Council, minus Mayor Chris Mitchell and Councilman Chuck Nicholson, discusses the city’s road problems during a workshop meeting Monday. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Councilman Bill Grieve suggested the tax increase Monday night during a workshop discussion in a packed meeting room at the Norris Community Building, a half-hour before the regular March City Council meeting.
Grieve, who set up the workshop and led the discussion, said in his opening remarks that the city had “gotten behind” on street repairs, and has a lot of catching up to do.
Only two other council members were present for the workshop, which began at 5:30 p.m. They were Loretta Painter and newcomer Travis Honeycutt, who was recently appointed to the council to replace Will Grinder, who resigned in September.
Mayor Chris Mitchell and Councilman Chuck Nicholson were away on planned vacations, and did not attend the council meeting, either.
The only outside money Norris gets for road maintenance comes from an annual payment of about $55,000 from the state’s gas tax revenues, Grieve said.
“We have to accumulate three to four years of that to do a [road] project,” he said.
Grieve noted that the recent resurfacing of a short section of East Norris Road close to downtown cost the city $175,000, and to finish the work all the way to the traffic light at Andersonville Highway would cost an additional $275,000 – which the city does not have in its budget.
The city’s most-recent property-tax collection brought in a total of $774,000, which went into the city’s general fund for regular operations.
He proposed raising the city’s current tax rate – about 88.5 cents per $100 of property valuation – by 7.1%, to about 94.8 cents per $100, which he said would generate about $55,000 more annually.
That extra money would go into a dedicated fund for roads, he said.
The increase would average about $63.95 a year in additional tax for each property owner, he said.
About 30 residents were in the council room, and their opinions were mixed on whether they would favor such a tax increase for roads.
But Councilwoman Painter said that she would first like to see the city hire an engineering firm to assess the current road conditions and prepare a plan for improvements.
“We need to bring an engineer in to see what we need to do, what needs to be addressed first,” she told the assembly. “We need an expert to come in and give us options.”
Joe Feeman, chairman of the Norris Planning Commission, told the crowd that Norris’ annual property tax collections have risen just 14% over the past 15 years, while the overall inflation rate over that period has been 42%.
“I would be in favor of a property tax increase to fix this,” Feeman said of the city’s road-maintenance problems.
No action was taken, as the meeting was a workshop only, with no authority to make any binding decisions.
Some of the discussion of the roads issue spilled over into the council meeting that followed, but there were no actions taken there, either.
In other council business Monday, during the regular meeting, the council voted 3-0 to approve on final reading an ordinance creating a new city zoning map.
The new map does not rezone any property, City Manager Bailey Whited said.
It’s merely intended to update the zoning map that the city last approved in 2013, with the new map incorporating several zoning changes that have been made since then.
The updated map had been approved by the Zoning Commission.
