Senator David Koehler has introduced SB2447, which will increase property taxes to the majority of McLean County property owners and is designed to provide the Bloomington Normal Airport Authority with a greatly expanded tax base.
“It’s modeled after what we did in Peoria county many years ago, where the tax base is only a small portion of the area that the airport serves …in order to really a fair system of having all the community help to pay for those services to expand it,” said Koehler. “We are elected by the constituents to make decisions like this.”
Koehler said that he’s talked with now-State Sen. Tom Bennett and State Sen. Sally Turner on this.
“The airport is an important economic development,” said Koehler.
Is the airport struggling, is that why they need to expand their tax base?
“I’m not going to propose to say what their position is on this, but we have had discussions on this. It is a matter of expanding the base so everyone can pay a little bit without having the citizens of Bloomington and Normal pay a lot,” said Koehler.
As first reported by Edgar County Watchdogs, typically, the method of including properties into the tax base of an airport authority is to have residents of specific townships pass a referendum, or for specific owners to sign a petition for annexation if they want to get saddled with more debt.
Within Section 9.1 of the Airport Authorities Act are directions on how to properly annex additional properties into the authority either by 1) a petition signed by a majority of the landowners in the area to be annexed, or 2) by a petition for referendum signed by at least 10% of the landowners and submitted to the voters as a referendum. These methods would, however, require the agreement of property owners, which is apparently too big of a hill to climb for Bloomington and Normal.
Instead of using the statute to expand its tax base, the legislator Koehler has propose SB2447, which amends the law.
So why was this law created in the first place, why does it exist?
“I’ll look into that,” said Koehler. “We’ve done that in Peoria…the legislature can pass a bill which overrides that [the current law] …the question is: Is the logic there? Is the issue there? I think it is.”
