2023/05/15 - Mayor's Column: Positives of Good Development
“AN OPEN DOOR TO O’FALLON”
A WEEKLY NOTE FROM MAYOR HERB ROACH
Last week, I wrote about what it takes to bring new businesses to the community. Growth is healthy for a community. It helps bring in economic activity, amenities, and people. But still, some people would rather see all growth and development halted.
The problem with that is that cities don’t stand still, they grow or in other cases they start to fall backwards. When that happens, you see an impact on public services and in many cases, higher taxes and a decline in population. All we must do is look around to other communities around us and see what happens when cities start declining. Fewer Jobs available, schools decline, infrastructure is not maintained, and safety becomes a problem.
We have tried to have smart growth, not just any growth for the sake of growth, in the residential and commercial developments that have come to O’Fallon. This type of growth has allowed us to produce Jobs, improve medical availability, maintain services to our citizens and to lower the city’s portion of your Property Tax Rate to a 35-year low.
These new developments and businesses produce jobs, real-estate taxes, sales tax and other revenue for our community. The commercial property in our city pays a good portion of the real estate taxes that support both our City and our Schools. Which in turn takes the pressure off tax revenue needed from homeowners.
Did you know that the sales tax, food & beverage tax and the hotel tax that the city collects from our businesses produces almost 250% more revenue for the city than the city’s portion of your real estate tax bill (which is only about 11% of your tax bill). Plus, well over 65% of sales, food, and hotel taxes are paid by visitors to our community.
This money goes to support police, 911 services, streets, parks, city debt, storm water and more.
I hope that this will give you a better understanding as to why we continue to use smart growth as we work to develop the type of city that the majority of people have said they wanted in both the development of our 2040 Master plan and in our Citizens surveys.
As residents of O’Fallon, you should always be able to reach out to your elected officials and ask questions about what is happening in O’Fallon. Having open communications is important to me and something I care very deeply about. Thank you for reading, and please remember, my door is always open.