Downtown property owners chose public safety, economic development and maintenance as their top three priorities when considering whether to establish a Municipal Service District in downtown Wilmington, according to the results of a Wilmington Downtown Inc. survey.
WDI shared the survey results and discussed the potential for establishing an MSD, a designated portion of a city where a special tax is assessed to pay for extra services, at a public meeting Wednesday, and another public meeting on the topic is scheduled for March 12, said Ed Wolverton, president and CEO of WDI.
But the survey, the session this week and planned future activities are part of a deliberate process, Wolverton said, which will be ongoing and is scheduled to culminate in a recommendation WDI will make to the Wilmington City Council in May.
“Between now and the next meeting, the task force will really roll up their sleeves and begin a much more thorough process of figuring out what public safety kinds of services can an MSD implement that expands on police presence now – It has to be over and above what’s already being provided,” Wolverton said.
The same efforts will take place for the survey-identified priorities of economic development and maintenance, he said.
“They’ll assess what those services are, figure out a cost of doing that and determine if that’s something that would add value to the property, business and residential owners,” Wolverton said.
Additionally, the task force, a group that includes business and property owners, plans to travel in January to study MSDs in Winston-Salem, Durham and Raleigh. They’ll meet with the third-party vendors that provide extra services to areas in those cities, Wolverton said.
The group is also expected to learn more about how the other cities get input from residents and owners when deciding what projects and/or services their MSD money pays for.
“All of them have a slightly different citizens’ oversight approach,” Wolverton said of the three communities on the itinerary.
A version of that oversight approach was what Tom Harris, owner of Front Street Brewery and a member of the current MSD task force’s steering committee, objected to in 2011 when WDI proposed a similar measure. Harris said he feels a Wilmington MSD panel must be representative of all those who would be paying the added tax. He said he believes an MSD with the right oversight approach would be beneficial for the area, using the example of Raleigh’s downtown ambassadors program as one of several ideas that could apply to an MSD here.
The Raleigh ambassadors wear red jackets, and some of their duties include discouraging panhandlers, reporting problems to authorities and being available to give directions or walk people to their cars, according to www.godowntownraleigh.com.
“Ambassadors play a safety role because they give people peace of mind,” Harris said.
Some MSD survey respondents did not rank anything, choosing to write “no new taxes” instead to express their opposition. At the meeting Wednesday, some people who attended also shared their objections to the idea of an MSD, Wolverton said, specifically with regard to an MSD’s impact on residential property owners and, in the case of one attendee, whether an additional tax might discourage new businesses.
“It’s definitely a viewpoint, but there’s another viewpoint that says that people are also looking for quality and they may be willing to pay for quality,” Wolverton said. “So figuring out the proper mix here is part of this entire process.”
