Money will not come from Dreyfus funds
The Greene County board of supervisors agreed Monday to fund $10,000 for the Scranton Manufacturing project through Greene County Development Corporation, but the money won’t come from the county’s Dreyfus funds. Instead, the board committed to provide $5,000 in funds each of the next two years, with the source within the county budget not specified.
Each year Louis Dreyfus Commodities LLC provides the county with $50,000 in lieu of property taxes on the ethanol plant in Grand Junction. The supervisors use a portion of it for property tax relief and a portion as a discretionary fund for libraries, congregate meals and similar projects. The supervisors last week talked about using Dreyfus funds for the Scranton Manufacturing project.
They backed away from that Monday at the urging of board chair John Muir and supervisor Mick Burkett. “The obligation is there. We made that a long time ago. It’s just a question of how we’re going to meet it,” Muir said.
There is no written policy that requires Dreyfus funds be used only for non-profit groups, but that has become the board’s practice over the years. Also, there is an application process, and that has not been followed in this case. “We don’t have an application. We can’t act on it,” Burkett said. “It’s not that we don’t want to fund it. We just need to be careful how we’re doing it.”
“The Dreyfus funds are there for us to use as we chose. This is something that in the long run brings a great deal more money than that back into the county in property taxes and what is derived from having 75 more jobs in the county. It’s not like we don’t get a return to the county. We do, quite clearly,” Richardson said.
Muir agreed there would be a return on the investment. “I don’t see a problem with the investment. It’s changing what we do with those (Dreyfus) funds that makes me nervous,” he said, and he named several possibilities for funding requests that could come.
“Technically, we’re not bound to use those monies in any particular way,” Richardson said.
“We’re committed,” Burkett said about the Scranton Manufacturing/GCDC funds. “We just don’t want to open a can of worms.”
Richardson originally made a motion to fund $10,000 to GCDC from Dreyfus funds. After discussion he amended the motion deleting the source of the funds. That motion passed unanimously.
