Ephrata considers taxing district

EPHRATA — Ephrata is examining creating a parks district to raise money for improving and running the city’s parks.

 A district would be run by a separate governing body, allow the parks system to put bonds on the election ballot and get money from property taxes. The district operates like a hospital district bringing in revenue from outside of the city.

The city has three district choices: a park and recreation district, a park and recreation service area and a metropolitan park district. The three types of districts differ in the priority when receiving property taxes distributed by the county.

“Metropolitan parks districts seem to be a little more flexible … They’ve made legislation recently that has made a metropolitan park district easier to form, easier to govern, more responsive to citizen needs,” Ephrata Recreation Director Ray Towry said.   

The decision to look at a park district comes after the city finished a roughly $20 million plan to improve the city’s six parks, including building a new community center and an amphitheater.

“Now we have numbers, but quite honestly, Ephrata is revenue challenged,” he said. “Our biggest employers are the PUD, the county, the (U.S.) Bureau of Reclamation and the school district. There’s no revenue there.”

Added to the lack of revenue, the city found about half of the people, who use the city’s recreation programs, don’t live in Ephrata, Towry said. Forty-six percent of the participants in 2006 recreation programs lived in Ephrata. This number rose to 51 percent in 2007 and dropped to 50 percent in 2008.

Towry said initial plans would make this new district about the same size as the school district.

“It needs to be something that would be beneficial,” he said. “The idea is it would be large enough so the people, who are using our facilities, would be paying for them.”

He said the city is early in it’s research, adding any decision requires voter’s approval and there will be opportunities for the public to voice their opinion. City staff is also looking at whether it would take money from other services.

“We want everybody to know before the rumors start flying. We’re going to work to see if it’s something that would work here,” Towry said. “We’d be looking at creating a task force … We don’t even know how much money it would be.”