NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Now that the City of Hutchinson has adopted the Downtown Master Plan, the question immediately arises, how do you pay for it?
"If you're going to make recommendations of improvements, you're going to have to find a funding stream to fund those," said Hutchinson/Reno County Chamber of Commerce CEO Debra Teufel. "Some of those can be put into the city's capital budget, but recommendations that Olsson made was around a business improvement district or a CID district, or sometimes you can use TIF as a tool, sometimes you can use STAR Bonds. Those have been debated recently. They have to look at the gamut of tools available to them and decide what is the right tool for the right project."
STAR Bonds are the tool being used by the legislature to try to get the Chiefs and Royals each new stadiums on the Kansas side of the line.
"The city must look at tools, like I mentioned, in order to be able to finance those," Teufel said. "I think STAR Bonds could be one of those. We've had conversations recently with some significant, what I would call tourism kind of drivers, and you know that STAR Bonds have been used here in the past in other ways, but they haven't been used in our downtown. I think if I were to foresee what might happen next, I think that a tool like that could be used as a driver for an attraction that impacts our downtown."
STRATACA was a STAR Bond project.
"I think that it always needs to be something that is a driver that brings in tourism from outside your area to truly have a payback and a return," Teufel said. "You define the boundaries of a STAR Bond district, and then there are several requirements of fiscal impact studies that have to be done to ensure that it will generate enough sales tax to actually repay the bonds. Then it pays for itself through that generation of that sales tax."
The devil, as always, is in the details of how long those bonds would take to mature and how extensive the project would be. None of that is clear at this point.
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