Grant-turned-loan raises temperature at council meeting

McCOOK, Neb. – The McCook City Council meeting turned up the heat in the closing minutes when the topic turned to “Is it a grant or is it a loan” for the NDED Rural Workforce Housing award that was earmarked for the Saint Catherine’s Project. The historic yet rotting building is owned by Adamark Investments LLC, and according to Phil Lyons of McCook, they are not authorized to do business in Nebraska. Lyons asked the council if they are prepared to get a million-dollar loan and make the citizens pay for the destruction of a privately owned property and if they are in the business of getting loans to mitigate the damages he has a few other properties that he would like to have the city consider. Lyons pointed out that if the city ends up with the property that is great, it was sold three times recently twice for $43,000 and before that $144,000. The value of the property is dropping and it’s not good business to buy high and sell low. McCook City Manager Nate Schneider said to Lyons, that just so everybody knows we actually wrote the grant application in two different forms so we could go ahead at looking at the possibility of remediating that building but also, we could go ahead and use those grant funds to purchase the building, and then demo with the rest of that. “Those are the conversations that we have had with the property owner. Schneider stated to the property owner that to work for the city the property needs to be owned by the city, and he agrees with Lyons, he wasn’t expecting this to have the loan revision, but that is what they are offering us right now. This is why we are having this conversation tonight, and there will be an action item that comes with a vote of a thumbs up or thumbs down.”

Vice President Jerry Calvin wanted to know why this “sleight of hand” happened. “It was thrown out as a grant he said and now when we get the money they are calling it a loan.

“That’s nonsense,” he said. “(Were) these funds that were funded by the Legislature” I’m sure as a grant who can just override the Legislature?

Schneider said that right now we are just in the process of trying to figure out exactly where they are coming from and trying to figure out if it will be modified back to a grant or not or do we want to continue with the current format as a loan. Calvin said “when you get a grant, it is a grant. You don’t get to change your mind and say Oh it’s a loan and you owe us the money. That is not the intent, and if we are going to do a loan I would really just want to do it locally from our local banks. Why would we borrow it from the state of Nebraska?”

Schneider said there is a lot of frustration and he understands his frustration, but our best bet is to try and see if we can remedy this back to a grant. Mayor Linda Taylor said there is a League meeting on August 23 she plans on attending to see if she can get any more information on what is going on with the grant being turned into a loan.

Mitch Lister of McCook also was concerned with the Saint Catherines’ property that the city doesn’t own yet and understands the need to remediate the property, but the city needs to own it first. Lister also asked if the city could require certain things from that property. Schneider said they can, and they have helped do everything they can. “They helped board up the windows. They took down the fire escapes, but it’s very difficult as Phil Lyons brought up its private property, and until the city takes possession of the property I don’t think it is a city problem except when we get called for fires like they have in the past or calls about kids in there that are not supposed to be in there running around.”

Schneider said, they wouldn’t want to do anything till they owned it and that was Lister's biggest concern is the city goes in and does the work and then they sell the property back to us after we paid for it.

In other news, Maggie Repass and Jim Lewis filed a topic for Consideration request to allow the use of ATVs and UTVs in the city limits. Repass opened by saying that this has been discussed a number of times and now that the city of North Platte got it done why can’t McCook?

Other cities around us like Imperial, Norfolk, Broken Bow, and Wahoo have made ordinances to allow them. Safety is the biggest concern and if they get registered and licensed. Who would be responsible for the licensing program would it be the city police department or would it be the clerk’s office. Do they have the manpower to do this and, what does it do to the city’s insurance are all things that they will look at moving forward. Age requirement was discussed, is it 18 and older? The good thing is that these are all other questions that other communities have had and moved on from. McCook doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel here, we just need to find the correct balance that will work best for everyone. Mayor Linda Taylor was excited that this is something that we are taking a good look at because it could be very beneficial to the growth of the city. Repass said that if you get enough cities and towns passing these on their own eventually you will get the state to go the direction of states like South Dakota, Wyoming and Arizona and the state will change the laws, but you need the support of the communities first. They talked about if they would just do ATVs or do both UTV’s and ATV’s. The group will continue to work through the right ordinances and figure out the best way to bring this forward to the council for a vote.