Time for a little "pay to play"

The Watertown City Council faces a daunting challenge. It must find some way to deal with development pressures on the city side of Interstate 81 without completely ignoring the capital needs of the rest of the city. How it meets that challenge will have a significant impact on taxpayers for years to come.

With requests for sewer and water extensions on Commerce Park and Gaffney Drives and on the west side of the former Seaway Plaza, the council is facing new, unplanned work that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a few million. Two new hotels proposed for Commerce Park Drive will require new water mains and an extensive upgrade to a sewage pumping station, investments the developer wants the city to make. And further development along I-81 adjacent to the Holiday Inn Express will require new sewer and water lines — and probably a new city street linking the development with Gaffney Drive, a road that was proposed to become Western Boulevard.

These improvements have been favorably reviewed by most of the City Council. Mayor Jeff Graham has said that the increased tax base from development will help all city taxpayers. And with some caveats, that’s true. But the caveats are doozies.

One caveat is that while the city is putting capital money into the new developments, other projects are falling by the wayside. Things like deteriorating city streets — Breen Avenue and Factory Street are great examples — decrease the city’s quality of life and leave residents and businesses along those streets wondering where their tax dollars are going.

And there are other projects not quite so taxpayer friendly as fixing streets that nevertheless are important. The city’s continued failure to separate sanitary sewers from street runoff means that in periods of high flow, untreated sewage enters the Black River. This condition has been a problem since the city began treating sewage scores of years ago, yet progress on correcting it is torturously slow.

It isn’t wrong for the city to consider new capital proposals. City officials are elected to do the triage on capital spending and set the priorities for the city’s future. As part of that responsibility, the council needs to be cautious about lunging after the latest “big new thing.” While hotels and retail development are now bright and shiny, their luster dims quickly as their cost to the city grows. And whether developers want to agree or not, there is ample precedent for the city to require that they help pay for the improvements that so narrowly benefit them.

The city should encourage development on the west side. But it shouldn’t pay for it alone, especially at the expense of other equally important and deserving projects. The council should tell Vision Development and Russell & Dawson, the companies asking the city to expand its infrastructure to them, that it’s a two way street — they must bear some of the costs. Pay-to-play isn’t such a bad thing when companies hope to reap millions in profit over the coming decades.