Vice Mayor Carlisle suggests methods to improve Holbrook

After brainstorming over the course of a few days, he said he had come up with some rough concepts that he thought the council should consider.

“Something we never put any kind of money to, but always talk about, is code enforcement and beautification of our city, but the reality is that we’ve never funded a full-time person with the legal background that costs about $100,000 to $200,000 a year,” he said.

Carlisle went on to say that the city has never done “big time” advertising on Interstate 40 for local businesses to pull people off of the highway, something he estimated could cost another $100,000 to $150,000.

“Then an economic development firm or director that’s done that stuff before and really put that together, means we’re going to pay $60,000 to $100,000 for somebody like that, plus supports at another $100,000 or more. But those are dollar amounts that we’ve never put together,” he said. “We’ve all talked about projects or developing small business, but we’ve never had a funding pool. Well, $200,000 a year would be good for that.”

He suggested the city look into U.S. Department of Agriculture grants for rural areas and start a small business incubator, “but there would have to be funding source created; a half-cent sales tax or a property tax, there are no other options to raise money,” said Carlisle.

“We don’t really have any developed land where people can go in and build one, two, three, four, five, 10 houses a year. We’ve talked about in-fill, how to get people to sell their property so we can get in-fill. But we’ve never put any dollar figure to that or assigned a person or found that person and said this is what we want. I want to get it out ahead of hiring one man or woman to come in and solve all our problems.”

Carlisle emphasized that it would be a multi-pronged process that would require the city to raise money.

“We’re going to have to ask the citizens of Holbrook to pull out their pocket book, whether it’s a sales tax or a property tax for us to put together a plan. I think they would probably vote for something like that if we had a real plan that they could look at, that we could publish in the newspaper and people could think, ‘Yeah, this is something I could get behind, and I’ll put a $100 a year out of my property tax or I’ll pay more in sales tax to do this type of thing’. This is my response to the question, what are we planning? I don’t want to get bogged down with city managers and stuff like that, I want a multi-pronged approach.” Councilman Tim Dixon agreed with Carlisle, and added that he felt the city had a lot it could do towards beautification and advertising on the interstate for Holbrook, as well as making better use of the interstate and highway entrances into the city. “I think there’s a lot we can do as a council and as a city to improve Holbrook,” he said.

The council is currently seeking a moderator to assist the council in determining agreed upon goals in what is anticipated to be lengthy work session.