With improvements by the Arizona Department of Transportation on State Route 260 having been completed last year, the Town of Camp Verde has been seeking business development for the commercial corridor along the roadway. The town has approved some new retail, recreational and other business ventures for the land between Interstate 17 and Cottonwood and is taking advantage of a federal program creating Opportunity Zones, where developers receive a tax break for investing in an economically disadvantaged area.
Much of the proposed commercial corridor still remains off of a sewer system. At a meeting on Jan. 15, the Camp Verde Town Council discussed the possibility of creating a Special Assessment Tax District in order to finance the improvements. The council heard a presentation by Mark Reader, managing director of Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Inc., a financial services firm that has created similar special tax districts in other municipalities. The council did not vote on the proposal at the meeting, instead it merely heard the proposal as outlined by Reader.
Under the proposed plan, the town of Camp Verde would create a special tax district along State Route 260, which would then be able to take out a bond to pay for sewer improvements. Rather than the liability for the bond being placed upon the whole town of Camp Verde, it would only apply to the area within the tax district, and therefore only the property owners affected by the sewer construction would be taxed to pay down the debt.
“Ultimately that results in the issuance of bonds to finance public infrastructure that that particular development benefits from,” Reader said at the meeting. “Only the people that benefit from the specific public infrastructure put in the ground will pay for their fair share of that public infrastructure.”
Under the plan, Reader expects that each property owner will pay taxes to pay off the bond over the course of the next 20 to 25 years.
Camp Verde Town Manager Russ Martin said that the town had discussed the proposal with some of the property owners in the proposed tax district and had gotten potential support, though he said much of it remains still preliminary. He said that the town did not yet have a timeline for when it would move forward with the creation of a tax district or the construction of sewer infrastructure.
