After city officials voted Tuesday night to create Wilmington’s first Municipal Services District, the next tasks are to appoint an advisory committee made up of at least 13 members and then choose what entity will manage the extra services.

Creating an MSD means charging some property owners an additional tax for extra services or projects within a certain area of a community. In Wilmington’s case, the MSD is set to take effect in July for the Central Business District downtown.

The City Council, which voted 6-1 in a lengthy meeting Tuesday night to create the MSD with Councilman Paul Lawler voting against the measure, will appoint the advisory panel.

“I’m concerned that we don’t have a service plan,” Lawler said Wednesday, referring to the fact that the proposed plan could change. “We’re going to impose a tax, but we don’t know what services we’ll provide, and we don’t know what the advisory board will look like.”

The proposed MSD plan would levy an additional tax of 7 cents per $100 of tax value on CBD property owners, resulting in an annual budget of a little more than $275,000 to fund extra security, cleanliness, economic development and other programs for downtown.

That amounts to $175 a year for an owner whose property has a tax value of $250,000, or $700 a year on a property worth $1 million. That proposal is not set in stone and can be changed by the MSD advisory panel.

Moving forward, Lawler said there’s an interest on the part of city officials in being sure that the majority of the people on the MSD advisory board are property and/or business owners who will have to pay the tax. 

Proponents of the plan were pleased that the MSD has finally been established.

“I’ve advocated for this since my first election run. I always feel that downtown should learn from the best practices of other cities,” Councilman Kevin O’Grady said.

He said MSDs have proven to be transformative in other municipalities.

“It helps get over that image problem a lot of downtowns have with cleanliness and safety even if they’re not deserved. MSDs really combat that,” O'Grady said.

Some property owners have opposed the MSD. On Tuesday night, 28 residents petitioned the council to be exempted from the tax, but those requests were denied. They can, however, come back and seek exclusion again from the city council but they’d have to prove that the services do not benefit them, city officials said.

A previous effort to create an MSD failed, but the latest came about in 2014 when city officials asked Wilmington Downtown Inc. to evaluate the possibility.

“It’s been a lot of work with a tremendous amount of input and involvement from a wide range of people,” said Ed Wolverton, president and CEO of WDI, on Wednesday. "And it’s very common for there to be some disagreements getting to this point ... With the decision made then it will now move towards the management and implementation piece."

In October, the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce board stipulated in a resolution supporting the MSD that the district's services should be managed by Wilmington Downtown Inc.