Balanced Business

Maintaining fiscal health in New Albany

The key to staying healthy is maintaining balance, whether physical, social, mental or emotional. This too holds true for how a community must work to sustain a fiscally healthy economy. A community must balance more than its budget, it must meet its needs in both the short- and long-term.

According to New Albany Community Development Director Jennifer Chrysler, the most fiscally successful communities are the ones that create a strong partnership between the public and private sectors.

For New Albany, much of the health of its economy is based on the health of its business park. The city has made a concentrated effort to make the area an attractive place for employers to station their businesses. The city’s efforts are paying off as the New Albany International Business Park is now home to approximately 24,000 employees and more than $28 billion in private investment.

Roughly 82 percent of the city’s general fund revenues are income tax revenues. Most of those revenues are from employees working in the business park. The general fund revenues are used to support city services like leaf collection and snow removal, police protection, road maintenance, leisure trails and other amenities that residents enjoy.

“Out of all the businesses in the business park, over 40 of them are what are called economic base employers,” Chrysler says. “Which means that they either make something or they create jobs that then, because of what they do, might create other jobs. So, it has a multiplier effect, whether it’s here in New Albany or in the region.”

The business park’s success allows the city to provide exceptional service and amenities to its residents without putting increased income tax liability on its residents. This is important for a place like New Albany, as many residents work outside of the community in places such as Columbus. After paying an income tax in the city in which they are employed, many residents do not have to pay an additional tax to New Albany, which allows up to a 100 percent credit for municipal income tax to be paid elsewhere.

In addition, the revenue provided by the business park has prevented New Albany from needing to ask its residents for additional property taxes by placing additional levies on the ballot. In most cases, New Albany only receives approximately 2.3 percent of the property tax paid by its residents, which provides protection for the major source of revenue for community partners like the schools, township, parks and library.

The business park aids New Albany in maintaining fiscal health and over the past 25 years, the community worked toward growing and diversifying the park, which has become home to a variety of industries.

“We really wanted to make a concerted effort to try to attract other companies from other industries in order to diversify the business mix in the park,” Chrysler says. “In order to protect against any sort of downturn in one sector of the economy, that we wouldn’t be negatively impacted or we would have other revenue streams to make up for that.”

Part of what makes the area an attractive location for businesses is how the city of New Albany takes care of itself. New Albany City Manager Joe Stefanov has made a point to have a firm focus on infrastructure and upkeep.

“Our philosophy has been to set aside money to be able to go out every year and take on a manageable amount of infrastructure repair and replacement,” Stefanov says. “It’s much easier to manage repairs when you do it on an incremental basis every year, as opposed to having to play catch-up and have tens of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure that’s falling apart.”

New Albany has the benefit of being a newer city, but Stefanov is still keenly aware of the importance of staying ahead of maintenance.

“A lot of these communities that have older infrastructure, they’re in a position where they have to go back and replace that infrastructure. One of the things that I have felt has been important is that we want to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve as it relates to infrastructure maintenance. So, while our water and sewer systems may be only 30 years old, they’re aging every year.”

This foresight has been mutually beneficial to the city, residents and businesses, as it is providing an environment that is not only a great place for people to live, but for people to work.

“It’s having a plan in place as a strategic plan community to know what we need to invest in and when we need it,” Chrysler says. “So then when (potential businesses) want to come and they’re interested in locating here, this is one of the options that’s going to be very easy for them to develop because all of those things are in place and they’re provided by the public sector. In turn, then the private sector comes in and creates jobs and creates revenue streams for the city to be able to support all of these other amenities. So, it works together in a very symbiotic way.”

Lindsey Capritta is a contributing writer at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at feedback@ cityscenemediagroup.com.