By Andra Bryan Stefanoni
news@joplinglobe.com
PITTSBURG, Kan. —
A recent discussion among the city’s department heads and city commissioners on potential citywide goals revealed just how intertwined plans for development and improvement are.
On the list: downtown revitalization, economic development, housing and neighborhoods, partnerships, the city’s image and marketing, enhancing quality of life, and public safety and welfare.
“When you consider each of these goals and all of their objectives, it’s the old question, ‘What comes first, the chicken or the egg?’ because they all kind of dovetail together,” said Mayor Patrick O’Bryan. “We want to bring business to town, but before you do, you’ve got to clean up the city, which illustrates that one thing doesn’t happen independently of anything else.”
But O’Bryan said that in the end, one priority seemed to resonate most with everyone: the improvement of housing and neighborhoods.
“What we came up with as a priority is to make the neighborhoods of Pittsburg more appetizing to perspective real estate buyers or people relocating to Pittsburg,” he said. He said business owners showing perspective employees the city have complained about the condition and maintenance of houses in neighborhoods throughout Pittsburg.
O’Bryan said the group talked extensively about enforcement of city codes for residential properties.
“It is on a complaint-driven basis, so unless someone complains, it doesn’t get action,” he said. “And there is too long a time between a complaint and the time the city can take some action — sometimes several weeks — so we really want to put some teeth into rules and regulations.” He said that would mean more inspectors on staff, which would mean additional expenditures in the budget.
The group also discussed the challenge of the city’s housing being more than 50 percent rental units, but landlords not being required to have a city license or abide by regulations like other businesses do.
Among the objectives presented by various department representatives is to restart some version of the former Residential Development Incentive Program in the near future.
Bill Beasley, director of public works, said the city started the program several years ago when development began picking up speed in new subdivisions outside the city limits.
“What we looked at were the opportunities we were missing in taxes if a new home was to locate inside the city limits,” Beasley said.
At a time when liquid asphalt had tripled in price, and costs associated with stormwater, sewer and other development projects were rising, the city offered developers 50 percent of those costs to help defray them. It worked, with initial subdivisions inside the city limits filling up as planned with houses, thus offsetting the city’s costs. But then the economy tanked, the city began losing funds, revenue declined, and property valuations and sales tax proceeds went down, so the city put a stop to the program.
“One thing that was brought up was that rather than add more infrastructure and new streets, we have areas we need to go in and redevelop because utilities are already there, the infrastructure already is in place, and it would be adding value back into those existing neighborhoods,” Beasley said. “We have programs out there that can help with that, like a tax abatement program.”
Such a program would allow a homebuilder to pay for five years of taxes on a lot at the cost of the lot before a home was built, a savings of thousands of dollars, he said.
One objective on the list to improve neighborhoods was continuing to provide the annual spring cleanup program, but it was fraught with problems this year.
Crews were scheduled to work in north Pittsburg one week and south Pittsburg another week, picking up and hauling away curbside piles of debris. But people came in from outlying areas, often at night, and added their own debris to lawns. In addition, treasure-seekers went through the piles, also often at night, spreading debris across lawns as they sorted. As a result, the work took crews three weeks rather than two.
“We don’t know if we’ll offer it again in this form in the future,” Beasley said.
Beasley said the city would consider a drop-off trash container area for next year’s program. Crews could check residency, and separate recyclables and electronic waste.
“On the plus side, we’ve had more this year than we’ve ever had,” he said. “We hauled 175 Dumpsters to the landfill. That means we got 175 Dumpsters worth of trash out of our city.”
