Wurtland rolls back payroll tax

Dec. 11--WURTLAND -- Acceding to the demands of opponents, the Wurtland City Commission rolled back a recently enacted payroll tax Tuesday.

The commission agreed to set the tax at 1 percent of gross income rather than the 1.5 percent it had set when it enacted the tax in November.

The commission also deferred until March 31 enactment of a 1.5 percent net profits tax on businesses in the city. It heard opposition to that tax as well, in the form of an attorney who represents clients at the Wurtland Riverport.

However, the commission is virtually certain to adopt the tax at some level because it desperately needs money to pay the bills at its sewer plant. The city was left holding the bag for the plant's expenses after Sun Chemical, its major user and the one for which the plant was built, closed earlier this year.

Most of the payroll tax opponents were teachers at Wurtland Middle and Wurtland Elementary schools who grumbled the tax is unfair since most of them don't live in the city and can't afford it anyway. They also said the sewer plant problems weren't theirs and they shouldn't have to pay for the city's mistakes.

"We don't live in the city of Wurtland and we weren't part of creating the debt. We didn't create the issues that got them in debt," said Lawanna Conlin, a counselor at Wurtland Middle School.

The issue Conlin was talking about is the massive expense of paying off and continuing operation of the plant, which was made to industrial standards and capacity, and which is costing the city around $40,000 per month, according to Mayor Donna Hayes.

The city still owes $1.8 million for the plant, she said. Until Sun Chemical left it was the source of 97 percent of income for the plant, she said. "We're in a horrible position."

The plant was built in the early 1990s to handle Sun Chemical's industrial discharge in addition to household sewage, and is large enough to service four cities the size of Wurtland, Hayes said.

The city already has cut every expense it can, including eliminating its police department, laying off three city employees and then cutting their hours and requiring them to increase their health insurance contributions, raising sewer rates by 30 percent and imposing monthly $650 surcharges on large business users. It also raised property taxes by 4 percent.

That doesn't matter very much to opponents, who say they pay taxes in their own communities. They believe Wurtland is saddling them with the responsibility for poor decisions made by previous commissioners. They also complained the city should have given them more notification when it was considering the tax.

The city did publish the required legal notices but that wasn't enough, they said.

"We were blindsided and very angry," said Wurtland Middle School Principal Amanda Powell. "One and a half percent seems small, but over a year it's a house payment for me. For some it's their grocery money."

A payroll tax will make it difficult for the district, already one of the lowest paying in the region, to attract teachers and especially substitutes, they said. Substitutes would opt for assignments at other schools in the district without the tax.

Ashland attorney Kim McCann asked the commission to suspend the net profits tax until May so the city can explore other options for bringing in money. She spoke on behalf of J.H. Fletcher and Great Lakes Minerals, both businesses in the riverport. Her clients believe the tax would be unfair because it wasn't on the table when they were recruited to locate at the riverport.

Hayes, who works at the DuPont plant just outside city limits, would not be subject to paying the tax, but she pledged to donate an equivalent amount of her pay to the city.

The plant is expected eventually to serve the Greenup and Lloyd areas when sewer lines are extended to those areas, and at that time at least some of the financial load will be lifted.

After the vote Powell said the 1 percent rate is something her teachers and support workers can probably live with and that they weren't expecting a complete repeal.

"I think it was successful in getting them to think about the fact that it was a little too high," she said. "That they considered lowering it in my mind is a victory for us."

MIKE JAMES can be reached at [email protected] or (606) 326-2652.

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