Home: City Manager's Updates

Posted 01/15/2008

Learning from Others

The staff made a trip to Great Bend this past week to visit with City officials about creating a nonprofit community housing development organization (CHDO) for our community. Great Bend has had a successful CDHO for a number of years. Their CHDO runs the Mutual Self Help Housing program and senior housing projects through their CHDO. The CHDO in Great Bend covers four counties and they have concentrated on building duplexes for senior citizens. The homes are beautiful. Seniors qualify based on income to live in them. The CHDO works with a developer to build the homes. This is something Junction City has considered for a number of years. There are grants and loans available to CHDO’s that are not available to cities. This could be one more answer to providing affordable housing in our community.

While we were in Great Bend we met with their City Manager and Assistant City Manager. We talked about a number of items including the ice storm damage and how they were handling clean-up. Coincidentally, they are going about it the same way we are, contracting with an outside firm to complete this huge task. Another topic discussed was economic development programs. They provide incentives. However, they have not been successful with recruiting any new companies. They do have a shortage of available labor. They have been successful with a couple of grants from Senator Roberts and Senator Brownback to assist with highway improvements and the development of a raptor center at their zoo. Great Bend assists developers with new subdivisions by paying for storm sewer work within the subdivisions. Like us, Great Bend is struggling with how to repair their streets. They are considering using the Kansas Department of Transportation revolving loan to do street maintenance. The City of Junction City used this program in 2006, borrowing over $3 million to complete 20 miles of improvements to existing streets. We will be doing more improvements in 2008. The special highway dollars we receive from the state of Kansas pays this loan back.

It was interesting to hear that Great Bend faces the same problems we do. They have not raised their mill levy for a number of years, but taxes have gone up as other taxing jurisdictions have raised their levy. A similar situation exists in Junction City. Since 1997, the Junction City’s mill levy for city services has dropped from 52 mills to 47 mills, while the County and School District’s mill levies have climbed a number of mills.

We agreed that it would be good to organize a regular exchange with Great Bend in the near future. We would take our department head staff there to meet with their counterparts and Great Bend would come to Junction City. Sharing ideas and talking about how we address various issues could be very helpful. For you see, our problems are the same problems many other communities across Kansas face.

Email Rod!