Nipawin’s mayor says the $50,000 funding it has offered the Business Improvement District is part of an effort to make it financially self-sustaining – and that council was open to compromise if the district’s board had come to the table.
Rennie Harper said that when council approved an approximately $105,000 budget for 2017, it had let the district know it wouldn’t get that amount for 2018.
“At the time we approved that, we were very clear to let them know that after this year, we were looking to having them more self-sustaining.”
The mayor said as part of that drive to sustainability, they wanted evidence the business community would support a $100 levy per commercial property.
“We were looking to have some endorsement of the BID by the businesses in our community and we wanted some kind of formal survey to be able to tell we were actually spending the money where the majority of businesses in community wanted us to do. We never received that.”
Harper said there were numerous meetings between the district and council throughout the year, but when the district provided a request for $117,000 from the town, council said that wasn’t possible and asked the district to meet with them to try to carve out a compromise. The mayor said that offer was rejected twice.
So when council worked out a funding offer for the district, they looked at what a $100 levy would bring in. Harper said the town estimates it would have brought in close to $29,000 of funding, so they thought $30,000 in cash was appropriate, plus $20,000 worth of services in-kind.
“That’s how we made the decision. It was not made lightly. It was made with lots of thought and it was made asking people to come to the table to talk about it more,” Harper said. “As a result, our decision’s been made.”
The district’s board rejected that funding offer at their meeting Dec. 13.
“This was not a surprise,” Harper said. “There was lots of conversation and as a matter of fact, we continue to support the concept of a BID. No question about that.”
As for the district’s concern the offered funding was not enough to hire a co-ordinator to meet the province’s Main Street program requirements, the mayor said that was one of the points a discussion could have cleared up.
The mayor said there was no malice behind the decision.
“This is us thinking if we’re going to have a BID, it needs to be much more sustainable,” she said. “If you investigate BIDs in the province, there are no BIDs that receive the kind of money that the Nipawin BID has received over the years.”
If the district’s board does resign their positions en masse, Harper said the town will continue with a Business Improvement District. Council would have to discuss what it would do next, but just appointing new members to the board was the most appealing option.
