City, school board unite for growth
There are two things about Monday night’s Tax Allocation District development that represent real progress in Columbus. (There are potentially a lot more than two, which is the whole point. More on that in a moment.)
One — though technically it is old news — is the very availability of the TAD process for economic development here in the first place. Columbus voters defeated a TAD referendum nine years ago by a membrane-thin margin, a decision that in the view of many (though, as the polls showed, not a voting majority) was a missed opportunity. Seven years and a Great Recession later, voters approved TAD financing by a decisive 18 percentage point margin.
Maybe even more notable is the fact that county’s two taxing authorities, the Columbus Consolidated Government and the Muscogee County School District, which historically have not always enjoyed a civically or fiscally symbiotic relationship, have come together for a common purpose.
Monday night the school board unanimously joined Columbus Council in approving four agreements forming TADs for improvement of areas in need of renewal and/or development. In a Tax Allocation District, the property tax that goes to the local government is frozen, bonds are issued for redevelopment, and the increased tax revenue from improved properties is used for paying off the bond debt and maintaining/improving infrastructure within the district’s boundaries.
This approach to revitalizing blighted areas is as close to a no-lose proposition as the real world has to offer. Better neighborhoods mean more business, less crime, more drawing power for area schools, and ultimately more tax money both for the city and for the schools themselves. Meanwhile, as Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce President Brian Anderson noted, there is no tax liability to either the school system or the city – only the long-term likelihood of tax-base growth.
Poverty and blight are the most daunting challenges any city faces. Such a low-risk approach to those problems would seem to be both an economic and a moral imperative.
High bounce-back
On the subject of economic development, the report that the Cincinnati-based office-support services company Convergys Corp. will move some of its operations into the former Road America complex is one of those rare cases of the positive news being better than the negative news was bad.
Road America announced in February that it would close its Victory Drive facility, which employed about 200 people full time, and move all those call center-related jobs to Florida.
Enter Convergys, which has announced plans to bring more than twice that many jobs over the next 18 months. The hiring process will begin immediately — as in today — with an open house from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. at the state Department of Labor’s Columbus Career Center at 700 Veterans Parkway. (A second one is scheduled for next week.)
Information, including job application info, is available at the company website, www.convergys.com.
This story was originally published May 17, 2016 at 4:50 PM with the headline "City, school board unite for growth."