How would you like to spend $15,000 on home improvements – on someone else’s home? What if your city wanted to spend millions of your tax dollars to pay for improvements on hundreds of your neighbors’ homes?
Fellow taxpayers, if you live in the City of Coppell, you should know that our City Council is considering “city-funded rebate programs” to do just that.
I went to the April 24 Coppell City Council work session. One of the items discussed was their “Neighborhood Integrity Program.”
As part of that program, Coppell is working toward subsidizing housing renovations — both interior and exterior — on homes that are at least 30 years old and owned by residents who are 65 years old or older and have lived in Coppell for 10 years.
To qualify for a rebate, subsidized renovations would have to cost at least 10 percent of the home’s appraised value or $20,000 and provide “significant visual impact.” Rebates would be capped at $15,000 per improvement project, and homeowners could receive one rebate per year.
In the work session, council mentioned that 2,500 homes in Coppell would qualify for the rebates. If each of those homeowners took advantage of the proposed program, it would cost Coppell taxpayers $37 million!
You can read the details of Coppell’s proposed rebate program, which is based in some part on the City of Plano’s “Great Rebate Program,” in the Neighborhood Integrity Study that council members discussed in their work session.
In addition to potentially millions of dollars in rebates, taxpayer money would be spent on marketing and implementing the program.
Yet as the Neighborhood Integrity Program study confirms, this proposed taxpayer-subsidized spending is a “solution” for a problem the city doesn’t even have:
“While the City of Coppell is not experiencing neighborhood blight or a preponderance of significant deterioration of the existing housing stock, this is an opportune time to be proactive and nip the issues in the bud with Neighborhood Integrity Programs (NIP) that focuses on citizen engagement, neighborhood identification, and pride and potentially city-funded rebate programs to incentivize home and neighborhood improvements.”
Neighbors, it’s time to nip Coppell’s latest spending scheme in the bud.
Contact Coppell City Council members, and be sure to vote in the city election this Saturday, May 5.
The study and related documents are available online in the work session portion of the April 24 City Council agenda, which you can download from this link: https://coppell.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx
