TERRE HAUTE — The Terre Haute City Council had another long and lively debate Thursday night over a proposed ordinance to require some businesses to report daily sales information to the police.
In a discussion that lasted more than 90 minutes, the council considered an ordinance that, if passed, would require scrap metal, pawnshop and other secondhand merchandise dealers to report details of their daily purchases to police electronically over the Internet.
The goal of the ordinance is to help police recover stolen property and increase arrests for property crimes.
“It’s just a great tool,” said assistant Terre Haute police chief Shawn Keen, who spoke in favor of the ordinance to the council. Keen has been the main proponent of the electronic reporting system, which would use a private company called Leads on Line for the daily reporting.
The police department, using money seized in criminal cases, paid $9,000 for a one-year Leads on Line contract that started Jan. 1, Keen said. Since then, the department, using the system, has already recovered property that was stolen in Terre Haute in another part of the state, he noted.
In earlier council meetings, several objections have been raised to the ordinance. An amended version of the ordinance was introduced at Thursday night’s “sunshine” meeting of the council.
“It now seems in many ways to be a workable ordinance,” said Michael Mervis, an owner of Goodman and Wolfe, a scrap company in Terre Haute. Still, Mervis urged the council to wait to pass the ordinance until a similar ordinance was ready to for passage by county officials as well. Otherwise, he said, people wanting to sell stolen property can simply go to scrapyards outside the city limits.
Another objection raised at Thursday’s meeting was that the ordinance requires secondhand dealers to report the prices they paid for items.
“That’s between the business owner and the IRS,” said Jim Smith, an auctioneer speaking at the meeting. Auction companies were exempted in the latest version of the ordinance, but Smith said he expects the reach of the law will grow and he still objects to it on principle.
Keen told the council that the price reporting, while part of state law, could be removed for the city ordinance.
Some council members, including Rich Dunkin, D-1st and Norm Loudermilk, D-3rd, spoke strongly in favor of the ordinance.
Terre Haute’s property crime rate is “very close to three times” the national average, Dunkin said. State law already requires businesses to record the sales information; the new law would only add the extra responsibility of reporting it electronically to local police, he said.
A representative of a West Terre Haute-based scrap business, Sugar Creek Scrap, said the ordinance would require her to add a full-time employee just to record the data. “We’ll have to close our doors,” she said.
The council could vote on this issue as soon as Thursday during its regular February meeting.
• Meanwhile, before the sunshine meeting, the council conducted a 20-minute “special call” meeting to take a vote on using local income taxes to back bonds for the East Margaret Avenue special taxing district, known as a TIF district.
The Terre Haute Department of Redevelopment plans to extend New Margaret Avenue, which runs from Indiana 46 to behind the eastside Walmart store, to Margaret Avenue. To pay for the $8 million project, the department wants to sell “bond anticipation notes” and then – in five years – actual bonds.
However, especially in the current economic climate, banks and other investors consider these types of bonds a little riskier than other types of municipal bonds, according to a representative of Umbaugh and Associates, an Indianapolis consulting firm helping with the road project. As a result, the Redevelopment Department urged the council to guarantee the bonds with local income taxes, known as Economic Development Income Taxes.
“It’s more like an insurance policy,” said Gary Malone, a partner with Umbaugh, who spoke at the meeting. The TIF district, which will include a new Holiday Inn Express, is expected to have more than enough development to pay off the bonds and the bond anticipation notes, he said. Backing them with EDIT funds will make it easier to sell the bonds at a lower interest rate than could otherwise be achieved, he said.
The council voted without opposition to back the bonds with EDIT funds. The bond anticipation notes could have total interest payments of as much as $400,000, Malone told the council. The bonds could have total interest costs of as much as $900,000. Property tax revenue generated in the TIF area should easily surpass those amounts, he said.
Arthur Foulkes can be reached at (812) 231-4232 or arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com.
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