The Kenai Peninsula Borough met on Tuesday, October 10th to make changes to an ordinance that would amend the Borough Code when it comes to regarding funds to the Borough service ares.
This would be for things such as giving funding to hospitals and other issues that require governmental funding.
This ordinance brought up the the KPB by Vice President Cox discussed that there was inner governmental loan option for the South Peninsula service areas, but considering the code was Witten for a different generation, it was not considered useful under today’s term.
“One of them is had a limit of $150,000 on it, things like that. And then at the very bottom of it says but if you want to you can write an ordinance and do whatever the assembly wishes anyways,” said Cox.
This would allow more of a structured guideline for the staff to have a better idea of what to ask for when it comes to asking for a loan.
His intention with adding an amendment to this would give the staff a better baseline when asking for loans, so there can be a faster, more structured process.
But in order to allow the ordinance to pass under those guidelines, there needed to be an amendment to omit the sentence that caused confusion.
With an amendment, it would remove the second to last sentence stating, “If the assembly determines that the loan will require an increase in the service area mill levy for repayment purposes, the loan must first be approved by the voters of the service area to regular or special election before any funds can be distributed”
“The reason to leave in the first sentence that the ordinance will state whether or not an increase would be needed. Is then that would be one of the factors that the assembly can use in deciding whether or not to even approve the loan or not approve the loan, and then to have that information. So next time we come around the budget, there may be an idea that there wouldn’t be a mill rate increase for that area,” said Cox.
After the second to last sentence was removed, the amendment and the ordinance passed with a unanimous vote.
