Council Business Light This Week

Two of the three City-County Council committee meetings scheduled this week have been cancelled. The Admin & Finance and Public Safety will not meet this week and not again until after the next full Council meeting on January 24. The Parks committee meeting will be held as scheduled.

I looked to see which proposals are pending before the first two committees. Their further postponement could be an indicator of disinterest, behind the scenes negotiations, or lack of urgency to compel a meeting.

There was one pending proposal before each committee that caught my eye.

Admin & Finance will not consider Prop 247 this week. This proposal would authorize the refinancing of the 1991 Harding Street TIF bonds. An important aim of this refinancing is to raise $15 million in new money to repay a Lilly loan to the City that was tied to this TIF district. This is part of the bigger effort to loan a private developer roughly $98 million for the North of South project. This proposal was introduced back on September 20, 2010. Its getting kind of long in the tooth - suggesting an interesting story somewhere in the City-County Building.

The other is Prop 368, introduced on December 6, 2010, and assigned to the Public Safety committee. I tried to view the committee meeting on December 8, to see what the issues were, but, the WCTY archives are not working at this time. This proposal would replace the current 11 member Crime Prevention Advisory Board with a 5 member Crime Prevention Grants Board to continue the job of issuing grants based on a competitive application process. The differences between the two appear to be the number of appointees from the Council equaling the number from the Mayor's office, the grantee list proposed to go to the Council's Public Safety committee for review (its not clear if it is binding review or not), and the job of monitoring the performance of the grantees would move under the City Controller and away from a service contracted by the Board. Not having access to the WCTY archives, I can't say if there is some hiccup with this proposal, or no urgency pushing the matter through.