Clear Lake council moving forward with new gas, electric franchise agreement with Alliant Energy

CLEAR LAKE — Clear Lake’s City Council this week gave their go-ahead to vote next month on renewing the city’s gas and electric franchise agreements with Alliant Energy. The new agreement would allow the city to set a 1% city franchise fee that would replace a 1% countywide local option sales tax, meaning that more money would be staying in Clear Lake.

City Administrator Scott Flory says it’s a no-brainer that allows that fee to stay in Clear Lake.   “Really the only one to be adversely impacted would be the City of Mason City and Cerro Gordo County, they’re going to get less of Clear Lake residents’ money, so Clear Lake residents’ money will stay in Clear Lake as opposed to Mason City under this.”

Flory says the funds will be used for several things that would typically be funded by taxpayer dollars.  “All of which really amount to property tax relief for the residents here in Clear Lake. Whether we’re buying police cars with it, or ambulances and fire trucks and those kinds of things, that’s money that would have to come from the taxpayers otherwise. So replacing the 1% sales tax with the 1% franchise fee just allows us to lean less on property taxes for those things.”

Councilman Bennett Smith says going with the 1% franchise fee to replace the 1% local option sales tax makes a lot of sense.  “This is a 1% fee on gas and electric utility bills that replaces the 1% sales that that we’re currently paying. Again, there’s no increase in taxes, in fact it gets even better, because as has been pointed out, more money comes back from the state than what we were getting under their current formula. So the exciting thing is we can apply those funds to property tax relief for public safety equipment. That’s a great move for us and I fully support that.”

The council at their first meeting in October will vote on a resolution to approve a revenue purpose statement for the use of the new franchise fee revenue.