Bid To Grab Rochester’s Assets

09/19/2005

Paul Munnis

Four local propositions have caught our eye and we have decided to comment upon them.

The first deals with selling RPU. We oppose this for several reasons. First, it puts money into our local treasury that offsets taxes and holds down energy costs for all of us. We have low municipal electrical rates here in Rochester and we want to keep them. Second, low cost wholesale energy permits us to heat our public buildings cheaper than retail electric will and to attract new businesses with superior rates. The fact that we will have to invest in expansion of the facilities in the future is not seen as any sort of a problem since we are a growing city and will get a revenue stream to pay back loans.

The second deals with selling the Mayo Civic Center. We oppose this too. The new facility will meet our community needs down the road as the new University Center expands and local conference facilities and a performing arts center are needed. Our city should retain the facility and lease it to the emerging University Center to meet upcoming needs withthe profits going to the City to offset taxes.

We see that the sales tax referendum vote is coming up on October 4th to extend the sales tax for two key purposes.

The first is for the expansion of transportation within the city. We support that expenditure and we support the extension of the sales tax to achieve it. This is something that all of us will benefit from. 

The second intended use of the extended sales tax revenue is to build a number of University Buildings including a Sports Stadium. Here we see two possibilities. One is that we build the facilities and then just hand them over to the University. That is a scenario that we oppose because we get to pay for them twice. Once to provide the buildings and then we get to pay a second time in our role as state taxpayers to staff and operate them.

The other scenario is that taxpayers build the facilities and then lease them back at a profit to the University Center. We wonder why this isn’t being done by the private center for profit if it’s such a good deal. After all, they could sell stock and make quite a profit from operations. Could it be that it’s a high risk low return proposition for the investors? In that case we oppose it. We advocate that a third party business plan evaluation be done and that if these buildings make good financial investment sense then we as a city should build them and then lease them back to the University Center for a profit; else, we should avoid the investment altogether as a bad plan.

We have a lot of challenges headed our way as we look to keeping our public schools funded, attract new employers to Rochester, and assure our infrastructure including public transportation is healthy and robust in this environment of rising energy cost. We would prefer to see a portion of sales tax money used to underwrite bonds to buy back the natural gas distribution franchise for the City of Rochester and to hand it over to RPU for management thus further holding down costs of energy for our homes, businesses, and public facilities. We also think that RPU should be running the local cable-TV and Internet broadband services rather than franchising it to Charter Communications. This is yet another way to feed money into the City coffers and to offset future property tax increases.

We expect that citizens seeking to hold down property taxes would agree with us and that a consensus could be arrived at in Rochester. After all, with so many visitors to our city, the sales tax is a much smaller impact upon our wallets than property tax increases are. We also would point out that with rising numbers of Baby Boomers retiring then the earnings base to support increased property taxes is becoming problematic. We need a plan for our city that reflects coming demographic reality.