Egg Harbor Enhancement Details Tax Increase, Highway Resurface

A public meeting to discuss the Enhance Egg Harbor project on Aug. 23 filled the village’s Bertschinger Center with a standing-room-only crowd. Ed Freer, landscape architect and urban designer with Minnesota-based Short Elliott Hendrickson, and Mike Simon from McMahon Engineering answered questions from residents following a presentation on the plans and funding for the project.

“The enhancement design program was to rebrand the street experience. We live in a village, we live in a center,” said Freer. “There’s a perception that the main street and the highway is a thoroughfare, not a place.”

The most obvious way to create a more intimate corridor is the narrowing of the traffic lanes from 16 feet to 11 feet. Freer said the wide roads, four feet wider than traffic lanes on 75-mph interstates, encourage speeding through the village without stopping at shops and restaurants.

By narrowing the lanes, extra room can be given to a 10-foot wide multi-use path on the east side of the highway and continuous parallel parking lanes on both sides of the highway through the entire village. The village plans to take advantage of the full 66-foot right of way along the highway, which has some residents worried for their roadside properties.

“I remember when I came to work one day and somebody chopped my picket fence in half so people could look at a gas station,” said Christine Tierney, owner of Christine’s Casuals and Classics.

“My understanding is they’re going to come up to the full right of way,” said resident Luke Bentley. “They’re going to come back into my property a second time, they’re going to drop it off into a bluff and they’re going to put the sidewalk in there.”

Any steps, railings, fences or signage that encroaches on the highway right of way maintained by the Department of Transportation (DOT) is subject to be changed or removed when the DOT begins resurfacing. Freer said that by having conversations with residents at the village level, it can keep the DOT from knocking on doors individually.

“The right of way has not been changed. We’re not moving the right of way,” said Freer. “What we’ve tried to do is solve all of that so the DOT won’t go to individual property owners and make modifications. The money that it would cost to move a stair 90 degrees or put in another riser or two, that’s all in the projected construction cost. The payment for those improvements is in the budget and we’re trying to simplify life for everybody and not have this hodgepodge of solutions as the DOT repairs something.”

The cost for the Enhance Egg Harbor project is estimated at $6.1 million. The village also has its sights set on other projects, including extension of walking trails north and south along the highway, landscaping at the beach and restrooms at Harborview Park, coming to a grand total of $10.3 million.

“I want to be very cautious with talking about the dollars because these are subject to change,” said Village Administrator Ryan Heise, reviewing proposed tax increases on residents. “We have not looked at our grant opportunities, we have not looked at our cooperative funding and we have not looked at our special assessment potential, so all of that will have an effect on the borrow.”

If the village can secure grants or work cooperatively with some businesses and individuals, the debt burden might be lowered. Special assessments, or a greater increase in taxes for specific property owners whose property lies adjacent to the proposed improvements, may reduce the debt burden on the rest of the taxpayers.

Currently, the owner of a $100,000 home is paying $117 a year in taxes. If bonds are issued to fund the project, that number would increase to $172 next year and stretch to nearly $240 in five years as the village tiers the financing and spreads it out over decades.

Some residents struggled to buy into nearly doubling their tax bill over the next several years. They were skeptical that improvements in infrastructure would translate into economic development.

“How do you quantify those economic gains and do they go back to paying down the debt?” asked a woman in the audience. “It’s great to increase taxes but they don’t always come back.”

Although unable to provide actual metrics of economic development and an increase in tax base directly related to a project like this, Freer spoke anecdotally about his projects and their impact on communities.

“For the last 30 years, every project I’ve worked on has had a four to eight time return on their investment,” said Freer. “You start realizing it one year after. One of the important things to realize, too, is that you have these existing businesses. When these improvements come in and things start changing, they will decide to stay, remodel, expand, so it’s not just bringing investments from the outside, it’s stabilizing what you have and growing what you have.”

The project will now go to the Village Board of Trustees for review after hearing comments from the public. The board will create a final draft of the plan and then bring it back to the community before sending the project out for public bid and researching funding methods.