BUCYRUS—The Bucyrus City Council has called a special meeting for Wednesday, November 2nd, at 4 PM in City Council Chambers.
Topics to be addressed in the meeting are city budgets and the city income tax credits for out-of-town workers.
After a heated debate last April, Councilman Kevin Myers made the motion to drop the effort to reduce the tax credit on out-of-town workers from the projects list.
Myers cited contentious reactions from the community as one of the many reasons he was making the motion.
Tomorrow’s meeting is open to the public. However, with the sudden scheduling of the meeting and the odd hour of the meeting (4 PM), it is unknown how many affected workers will be able to attend.
Economic conditions have continued to decline since April when Myers told council that the time was not right to burden out-of-town workers by reducing their tax credit:
“There’s a lot of problems knowing exactly when this is going to get addressed. There was not a clear plan given by the Mayor. Under the right circumstances, I might’ve agreed with this. But we are paying $4.00 a gallon for gas and jobs are leaving this community. Now is not the right time. I informed the Mayor of my intention and what I planned to do and explained why. When the Mayor brings a better plan forward we can decide if we want to move this to committee,” Myers said.
Mayor Jeff Reser did not indicate whether he had a plan prepared to present to the council.
City Auditor Joyce Schiefer proposed the referral of the tax credit back to the finance committee.
**UPDATE**
Mayor Reser reached out to CCN with the following comment:
“It comes down to this: if we are to maintain our services we need more revenue. Asking out of town workers who reside in the community to contribute is not a novel idea. Majority of communities in Ohio have reduced credit in some form.”
Crawford County Now will continue to cover this developing story.