It wasn’t that long ago when a return on investment of 1% on a CD seemed like a good deal, compared to the 0.1% banks were paying individuals. Municipalities were doing better but still struggling and needing to extract money from their residents and anybody driving thru town.
Naperville city officials had a brilliant idea. Why not do a partial, special census and see if city coffers could be fortified by an increase in population, and that’s exactly what they did. They spent $210,000 for the census, and bingo, it was shown that Naperville’s population had increased from 141,853 to 147,841. That’s a walloping increase of 5,988 residents, which translates into an increase of about $880,000 in tax income annually which projects to a total of $2.4 million in new revenue through May of 2021 when the results of of 2020 census will be certified.
That’s an amazing return on investment of 1,030%, which begs the question, what are they going to do with the extra revenue? City officials have been known to go through money like a hot knife through soft butter.
City officials said through a memo (big print) that a small amount will go toward capital projects, while the bulk of the new found revenue is earmarked for the city’s general fund. What exactly does that mean? The detail (little print) remains to be seen; big print giveth and small print taketh away.
They spent 210k to gain what in additional tax rebates, refunds or whatever from the Federal/State based on a 6k increase in populations? Somehow would bet it doesn’t even cover our citizens cost for the effort unless it pushed the population number over some magical number justifying City management wage and benefit increases.