As a local business and city property owner (Homer Bookstore), I've been watching the progress of the town square project. Having lived in a less then desirable section of Anchorage in the past, as well as in a nice East Coast town with a real town square, I can tell you which is preferable.
I strongly favor creating an area in the center of town that future generations will be proud of.
Like a lot of you, I've been a bit nervous about the speed and cost and sources of funding for this project. I've been hearing people say that we already are overtaxed and that this will cause our taxes to go up to the point that people won't be able to afford to live here. So I spent a day doing research to see if I could get a handle on how taxed we are compared to other places. Do you have any idea how hard it is to compare one place to another with regards to taxes? This isn't just trying to compare oranges to apples. This is more like comparing apples to duct-tape.
In regards to sales tax: at 7.5 percent, ours is the highest in Alaska. In the bigger picture it is still about 1 percent below the average sales tax the rest of the country pays. All but four other states have state sales taxes and many of those have local sales taxes piled on top of that. But that's only a small part of the tax picture.
The main taxes are sales taxes, property taxes, state income taxes and vehicle taxes. But then there also are luxury taxes, gas taxes, water taxes, bed taxes, alcohol taxes, highway taxes and probably a few others. These all need to get factored in with such numbers as the cost of living index, local wages and property values in any given area before a fair comparison can be made. When these are all looked at, Alaska is still a bargain place to live, with the lowest taxes of any state. Alaskans pay less then half the taxes of several other states.
For in-state comparisons, while Anchorage has no sales tax, it does have some of the highest property taxes in the state, making it slightly cheaper to live there. But I think most of us are here because we don't want to live there.
The big picture is that compared to average-town USA, Homer still has low taxes. The current Homer City Hall is embarrassingly overcrowded and will need to be enlarged somehow. The university, which historically has been tightwad cheap about spending money in Homer, has offered to buy the current city hall, which was originally built as a real estate office.
The city of Homer believes it can afford to build a new city hall without raising taxes. Building prices are going up at ridiculous rates, mostly due to the big demand for resources and building materials in places like China. (Guess how they got so rich?)
The Town Square people have been working on this concept for years and a city hall would be a great anchor for such a town square.
For these reasons, I'm in favor of giving the city the go-ahead for this project at this time with the assumption that the city doesn't need to raise extra taxes to pay for it.
Lee Post is one of the owners of the Homer Bookstore.
