Remarks to be delivered to the August 18, 2009 meeting of the Wichita City Council.
Mr. Mayor, members of the Wichita City Council,
I am here to ask you to deny the request for special assessment financing for the Lofts at St. Francis homeowners association to make repairs to their building.
I’ve spoken to this council about how the facade improvement program, in general, is bad public policy. In this case, it’s bad public policy compounded by the waiver of principles or guidelines that this council recently set in place.
I realize that special assessment financing means that the city is not making a grant of money to the homeowners association. Instead, the city is making a loan, which is required to be repaid over time.
What concerns me about this situation is that two guidelines in the city’s facade improvement program must be waived for this project to obtain special assessment financing.
The first is the private investment match. This is designed to ensure that the property owners have “skin in the game” and that the taxes will be paid back.
Here, the city is proposing that since the building’s owners have made a past investment in this property, there’s no need to require a concurrent investment. It hardly needs to be noted that anyone who has purchased property has made a past investment in that property.
Second, facade improvement projects are required to undergo a gap analysis to “prove” the need for public financing. According to the city’s report: “This project does not lend itself to this type of gap analysis; however, staff believes that conventional financing would be difficult to obtain for exterior repairs to a residential condominium property like this.”
So the city proposes to waive this requirement as well.
There seems to me to be a defect in the manner of ownership of this building. While the homeowners association and the individual condominium owners might not have anticipated that repairs would be needed so soon after the building’s opening, they must have contemplated that repairs and maintenance — to either exterior or interior common areas — would be needed at some time. How does the association plan to pay for these?
So what will happen if the city council doesn’t approve the special assessment financing? The agenda report states “Each individual condo owner would be required to fund a share of the cost.”
Isn’t that what private property owners do: fund the cost of repairs to their property?
According to the Sedgwick County Treasurer’s office, the appraised values of these condos range from $103,000 to $310,200, with an average value of $201,943. The maximum amount being added to each condo’s assessment is $4,022, although I have learned that the actual amount may be closer to $3,000.
That’s along the lines of what it might cost to perform a few repairs and paint a house that’s worth what these condos are worth. So I think it’s hard to make the case that these property owners can’t afford to make these repairs on their own without a loan from the city.
Furthermore, if the goal of the facade improvement program is to provide an incentive for property owners to fix up their buildings, I would submit that such incentive is not necessary in this case. This building is a valuable residential property, and the homeowners have a strong incentive to maintain the integrity and value of their property.
Mr. Mayor and members of the council, let’s ask these owners do just what thousands of homeowners in Wichita do every year: take responsibility for the maintenance of their own property without looking to city hall for help.