The Sun Valley City Council and mayor last week started to draft a list of priorities for providing affordable workforce housing.
The meeting Friday, May 30, was one of a series the council and mayor are holding before the council sets a budget for the fiscal year 2008-2009, which starts in October.
"We are working our way through these issues," Mayor Wayne Willich said. "I've promised a clean-as-a-whistle budget."
Councilmen David Chase and Dewayne Briscoe led the discussion.
Prior to the meeting, in an e-mail to the mayor and other council members, Chase asked them to put aside their differences in opinion and instead to focus on the problem and its solution.
"I highly doubt that anyone is going to move anyone else off of their core beliefs, so it seems pointless to debate the perception of the 'problem' via a filibuster ... ," Chase wrote. "Rather, we should focus on how we solve whatever the level of problem is that we see as the consensus."
Chase presented the council and mayor with a spreadsheet containing what he deemed the two major issues of affordable workforce housing—which city personnel to house and how to house them.
The first tab consisted of a list of six types of essential city personnel that could be eligible for affordable workforce housing. The second tab consisted of a list of 11 tactics that the council could use to make affordable workforce housing a reality.
<
Council members including Chase and Willich stack-ranked the two lists from highest to lowest priority.
The City Council and Willich generally agreed that first firefighters, then police officers and then Sun Valley's city employees should be the first to receive affordable housing.
As for the ways in which to achieve affordable workforce housing, no two of the council members agreed on any one of the 11 suggestions; only an average of their combined rankings put three options in the top.
First, the city should look into down-payment assistance for individuals who want to purchase affordable workforce housing units. Currently, the city sometimes assists its employees by subsidizing the employee's rent. Councilman Nils Ribi cited this as a waste of money because rent payments do not buy equity and is never returned to the city.
Second, the city should encourage more development per parcel of land by giving developers density bonuses. This practice was recently successful in a joint venture between former Sun Valley Mayor David Wilson—a builder—and Scott USA in Ketchum. The partnership is opening 15 affordable workforce housing units in the industrial area of Ketchum tomorrow, June 5.
Third, the council should look into building affordable workforce housing units on or near the Sun Valley fire station on Elkhorn Road.
The least favorite options were acquiring federal land to build more units and buying two new units in Elkhorn Springs where the city already owns two other affordable units.
Willich assessed the results and then asked the council to table the discussion, citing exhaustion with the subject.
Wayne Willich
