SOMERS POINT — In a 6-1 vote, City Council approved a $36,800 budget May 14 for the Economic Development Advisory Committee, freeing up funds for marketing and networking.
The 10-member volunteer body was formed to advise officials on economic conditions and ways to improve them.
Councilman Sean McGuigan questioned the expenditures, saying the figures provided were vague compared with the annual municipal budget, and wanted to know whether it was approved by the full commission.
“The breakdown here is very general,” he said. “It is not, in my opinion now, up to snuff. When we put together a budget, it’s hundreds of line items. But each one of those line items have a backup that we build that off of, whether it’s from quotes or from historical data.”
Councilwoman Janice Johnston, liaison to EDAC, said the full commission had approved a budget based on the expectation that it would receive $50,000 and pared it down to deal with the lesser amount provided.
“We’ve only had two meetings, so this is the best that we can come up with at this stage because we don’t really know what we’re going to do yet,” she said.
The commission, which was suspended for the first two months of the year and reformed with mostly new members, now is researching the best ways to promote the city with the funds allocated.
The budget earmarks $20,000 for marketing, $5,000 for promotional materials and $10,000 for business group memberships.
Johnston said it is unclear at this point what the marketing funds would be used for, noting some will go toward hiring a firm to boost the city’s social media presence.
She said the promotional materials would be signs and other items to welcome new businesses to the city and hold ribbon-cuttings.
Regarding networking, $5,000 will fund membership in the Atlantic County Economic Alliance, $250 for the Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce and $199 for the Cape May County Chamber of Commerce.
“All this would be doing is approving that amount of money … it would still come back to council in the form of a resolution,” Council President Kirk Gerety said.
McGuigan questioned how joining the business groups creates economic development.
“If you read the ordinance for what [EDAC] is supposed to do, it says to have relationships with the business communities, such as Chamber of Commerces and other business entities,” Johnston said.
“And you think that’s a wise buy with $10,000?” McGuigan asked.
Johnston said the ACEA has provided a lot of support.
“They helped us with our Master Plan. They can help us with anything that we want. We just ask them for it,” she said, noting the group is donating $10,000 to the Somers Point Business Association for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration. “They have a lot of opportunities we can take advantage of.”
McGuigan said he was not “warm and fuzzy about spending the $5,000.”
“You can’t draw a line from that $5,000 we spend to any economic development that’s happened in this city,” he said.
Councilman Howard Dill said he supports EDAC.
“I’ve found a lot of work that they do positive and I will be supporting this,” he said.
McGuigan cast the only vote against the measure.
“This whole system, the process that we went through this year with Economic Development, is not what we would normally do and do in the future. Circumstances put us here and I’m just trying to get everything caught up so they can actually start doing something next year,” Gerety said. “They will be involved in the budget process. It’ll be done at the beginning of the year and we’ll have more specifics and everything. We’re almost halfway through the year and we want to get these people doing something.”
On April 23, City Council adopted an ordinance that changed the wording of city code regarding use of the accommodations tax from “shall” to “may.”
Johnston feels the measure opens the door for City Council to stop funding EDAC’s efforts.
“The way this ordinance is written, they can literally give us nothing. So that’s my concern,” she said.
It states that all hotel and motel occupancy tax revenues will be deposited into general revenues and included in the budget.
Prior to the change, EDAC was to receive one-third of the tax revenue, not to exceed $50,000, which it used for marketing and other methods to boost the economy. City Council had to approve each expenditure by resolution, and the amount had dwindled over the past three or four budget cycles.
The new wording states an amount not to exceed 33.3 percent of the hotel and motel tax revenue may, at the sole discretion of the governing body, be appropriated in the subsequent year’s budget as a separate line item for EDAC.
It further states that EDAC cannot spend any of the money without authorization from City Council.
“This is to clean up that ordinance and give the ability to EDAC to come in and sit with the budget committee like everybody else does and make a request, and once it gets past the budget committee and it’s in the budget where we talk about it here, then you can pass a resolution guaranteeing you’re going to get your money to spend in the deal,” Gerety said.
City residents Ann Marie Gibbs and Joseph Ambrose were appointed to the commission May 14.
– By CRAIG D. SCHENCK/Sentinel staff