One of the city's goals for several years has been to "attract new residents." That's the driver behind several of the housing initiatives (now well underway), and is one reason behind the drive to increase retail (though the primary goal of that one is to make our tax base healthier).
It's often mentioned in connection with reasons to support a better school system than just what is required, and is now bandied about as a reason to build a new senior center.
So if we can establish the need to attract new residents as an agreed-upon given, who are the new residents we wish to attract?
People who already work here, but don't live here? New hires for existing businesses? New college graduates? Young families? Young professionals? Retirees? Middle-age, middle-income empty nesters?
Everyone, or no one at all?
Clearly, we need to capture a higher percentage of the jobs that are here. That means young professionals. If you consider that we now get about 10% of the new job takers that decide to live here and could move that toward 90%, in 10 years our problems would be solved. By capturing more of the salaries from those jobs for local residents, that injects more stimulus into the local economy and helps fund everything, jobs, services, etc. Those are the kinds of folks whose kids will do well in school and these parents tend to support schools in return. Those are the kinds of folks who can appreciate the variety of offerings in this community and will support them in return. Those are the kinds of folks who will carry this community on into the future.
So if we can establish the need to attract new residents as an agreed-upon given, who are the new residents we wish to attract?
I would base who we wish to attract on why we want to attract them. What are the reasons we want new residents?
I think you have to target the folks who will have the greatest impact on the tax base.
I’m thinking DOE employees are the prime target. Isn’t there some additional financial stipend/kick back, whatever, to the city for every citizen that works on DOE property and lives here? I ask because of the survey we fill out every year that our children bring home from school.
Not that I know of. What kinds of questions are you talking about?
What the folks who work there get is the reduction of commuting costs ($2k-$4k per year depending on where they live) if they choose to live here. The real lost benefit to the city is that if the salary leaves OR, we don't get the economic multiplier here. That plus these are the kinds of folks that we want to base our community on.
The survey I'm referring to asks questions about where ORS children's parents work - if they are federally employed and/or if they work on one of the OR DOE facilities. It even breaks down asking which facility they work at. That's all I can remember, but I'm sure I'll get another copy next week because we've had to fill it out every year that we've lived here.
I would be interested in knowing more about it.
I just made a quick inquiry and I think that it is a payment in lieu of taxes thing that goes to the schools. I think it is designed to deal with the fact that the federal facilities are tax-free and so they are causing some kind of financial impact by not feeding tax money into the channels that ultimately contribute to the school budget.
All the more reason to focus on DOE employees. I would assume there have been surveys done over the last 50 years as to why they don't move here. Does anyone have access to that data or know where to look to find it?
At one time the federal government provided generous subsidies to "federally impacted" school districts, meaning school systems that enrolled a large number of kids who lived on federal property or whose parent's employment was on federal property (and therefore did not contribute to local property taxes). As you can imagine, this has been particularly important for school systems located on Indian reservations or near military bases. Oak Ridge also has received this funding.
The federal government has cut funding for this program, so the subsidies to school districts like ours are no longer particularly lucrative, but Oak Ridge Schools still receive this funding (see
this PDF file listing impact funding by school district -- I'm probably not reading that correctly, but it appears to indicate that Oak Ridge got $70,376 in FY 2007 as a payment for 1,144.73 students).
Accordingly, every year parents are asked to fill out forms designed to determine how many Oak Ridge school kids "count" for purposes of federal impact funding.