Council weighs notion of adding $32 million to debt

Jackson City Council had its monthly meeting on Tuesday, two days ahead of schedule with Thanksgiving being Thursday.

There were a couple of points of contention as the five members of the Council who were present - Marda Wallace officiating, Larry Lowrance, Richard Donnell, J.P. Stovall and Frank McMeen - were wrestling with a budget request to take on a bond issue not to exceed $36.3 million, but Mayor Scott Conger said the ask is actually for $32 million.

Russ McKelvey was also a part of the meeting via speakerphone on the conference table.

After a few minutes of deliberation, questions, more deliberation and more questions, Conger tried to make it simple for the group.

“Y’all have seen this five times this year,” Conger said. “And it’s not new information except for three items.

“So if you’re reading the plan when we send it to you, then you should already know most of the information that’s in the packet.”

While Conger also spoke, he read off a list of other municipalities and their debt, Jackson’s $48 million of debt - as it stands now - was one of the smaller numbers on the list with many of them being more than $100 million.

Madison County’s debt - and County Commission Chairman Mike Taylor has said they’re in good shape in paying down debt and keeping a fund together to pay down debt if nothing else pops up that needs immediate attention - is a little north of $91 million.

The addition of $32 million would bring Jackson’s total debt to $80 million.

The Council approved a budget for the fiscal year that would allow for borrowing up to $7 million for capital improvements like fixing roads. Multiple Council members mentioned a time when former City Recorder Bobby Arnold said they’d need to borrow “no more than $12 million” for needs like fixing roads and buying new patrol cars.

So a lot of their questions stemmed from how did the proposed additional debt grow from $7-12 million to $32-36 million.

“This money is to pay for a lot of things we plan to purchase in our five-year plan plus the three new items,” Conger said. “So instead of a death of a thousand cuts of having to go and borrow smaller sums of money for who knows what kind of interest rates every couple years, let’s go ahead and get all that money we know we’ll need now, earn some extra money based on what we don’t use immediately and then use what we need when we need it.”

Different things mentioned in the five-year plan that Conger claimed they’d received multiple times this year included purchasing patrol cars for Jackson Police and other City departments and taking care of capital projects.

When asked about road work improvements, Wallace asked Conger if there was a ballpark figure on how much it would cost to fix all roads that need fixing. Conger said fixing all the roads they plan to fix in the next three years can be done for $19 million if materials and labor are available to even get it done.

The three new items Conger referred to were constructing a road to Great Wolf Lodge’s construction site from F.E. Wright Drive that will cost about $6.5 million, putting artificial turf on all 17 infields at the West Tennessee Healthcare Sportsplex that’s estimated at $4 million and the City’s financial contribution to the rebuilding of Airways Boulevard from Main Street to Hollywood Drive that is to be partially paid for from state grants.

The road construction for Great Wolf Lodge has been a part of the agreement since it was first announced in February of 2020, but Lowrance expressed frustration about not hearing this expense was coming up as quickly as it did.

“We didn’t know it was coming until very, very recently because of things that have happened,” Conger said, referring to Great Wolf Lodge officially closing on the land purchase on Nov. 15 and getting permits to do grading and other work to prepare for the construction project.

“Well I didn’t even know this was part of the agreement, and someone should’ve said, ‘Hey this is a part of the agreement, and it could cost this much,’” Lowrance said after the meeting.

When discussing the purpose of putting turf on the fields at the Sportsplex, local radio personality Chuck Walker spoke up as a travel ball parent and told the Council how a lot of teams will not play in Jackson because of their dirt fields and the lack of consistency in getting games played that can cause.

“We never play in Jackson because it makes more sense to us to play at Oxford or Southhaven where we know games will be played and don’t have to worry about rainouts, rescheduling and trying to have entire tournaments in one day or maybe a day-and-a-half,” Walker said.

Lowrance asked if anyone had an idea how many teams the Sportsplex is missing out on coming to Jackson because of the dirt fields. The Sportsplex has actually increased its number of teams coming to Jackson throughout a season each of the last few years, but they feel like that number can grow even more.

Lowrance expressed concern if they take this debt on then they’ll be forced to raise taxes next year.

According to new City Recorder Nathan Reed, the City is about 6 percent ahead of projections for sales tax revenue so far for the fiscal year, so concern may not be as real as Lowrance thinks it is.

“Then why not borrow $50 million?” Lowrance asked.

Conger said during a Facebook Live broadcast on Wednesday that the addition of the $32 million to debt would raise the annual debt service from a little more than $6 million to $8 million.

“And we can manage that,” Conger said. “And we’ll be able to get things our City needs, some things it’s needed for quite a while.”

The Council will officially vote on whether or not to take on the debt Tuesday at its monthly meeting, which will be Dec. 3 at 9 a.m. at City Hall.

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news