Yokum

ELKINS — Randolph County officials said providing information for the City of Elkins’ Tax Increment Financing (TIF) application is adding extensive extra work for the county assessor’s office — work that may continue for the next 30 years.

The Randolph County Commission is planning to vote today to send a letter asking the state Department of Economic Development to decline the City of Elkins’ application, officials have told The Inter-Mountain.

Elkins City Council voted Jan. 5 to submit an application to the state to issue bonds in order to fund several costly redevelopment projects through Tax Increment Financing, with a plan to issue up to $25 million in tax increment revenue bonds.

The proposed TIF District for Elkins includes approximately 308.125 acres of contiguous property, including parts of the downtown business district, the Industrial Park and the Elkins Railyard. Commissioners David Kesling and Cris Siler told The Inter-Mountain this week they were stunned to learn that the TIF process, if enacted, would result in some future tax money being rerouted from Randolph County to pay for the City of Elkins’ renovation projects — and that this would continue for the next 30 years.

Just preparing the information to be included in the TIF application has created a multitude of new work for the county, Randolph County Assessor Phyllis Yokum told The Inter-Mountain this week.

“I’ve never done a TIF before,” Yokum said. “We go into our system and we code each of these parcels on a certain screen with that TIF name. And then when all that is done, we can run a report that pulls the base value for 2022 off of each of these parcels and compiles a total.

“That is the assessed valuation phase that the TIF will be based on,” she noted. “If the assessed value in the TIF area goes up, anything over the base, any money from that new value goes into the TIF, and isn’t distributed to the entities, which are the county, the state and the board of education.”

Gathering the information for the base values is a lengthy process, Yokum said.

“I have to determine the base on personal property, businesses, machinery and equipment, inventory, anything to do with the business except vehicles. This is not an easy process.

“(Elkins City Clerk) Jessica Sutton and I have discussed this, and I said, ‘I will give you a list of personal property businesses in the city of Elkins. But it will have to be your job to go through that list and tell me which of those businesses are included in your TIF. Because my office does not have the man power or the time to do that.'”

Yokum said that, if the city’s TIF application is approved, the county assessor’s office will have a new annual set of duties to add to its current responsibilities.

“It’s my understanding that, when I do a certificate of evaluation, which all assessors have to do, we have to finalize our values and do a certificate of evaluation by March 3 every year, and we have to present that to the county commission, the board of education and all the municipalities. Because they have to know what the value is, so they can set their tax rate,” Yokum said.

“With a TIF, it’s basically like I’m going to be taking care of two counties. I have my regular county, but then I also have a TIF. When I do my certificate of evaluation, the new value has to be pulled out of the total. You have to know what the new value is, so you know whether it raised from the base or not. A lot of extra work. For 30 years.”

Yokum said the work on preparing the base information has begun but will continue for some time.

“Right now, we’re just going through and putting the TIF information on each of these parcels so that we can pull that,” she said. “That’s the real estate side, personal property side. Jessica has not given me a list of businesses yet that she wants in the TIF. There’s a lot more work to do.”

Yokum added that she has consulted experts across the state for guidance in preparing the information.

“I didn’t understand the TIF,” she said. “I called Leroy Barker, who used to be the state property tax director, and he’s doing contract work now. I called him and said, ‘Leroy, I have a TIF,’ and he said, ‘I’ll help you with it. There’s a lot of work that goes into this.’ And I said, ‘Well, I realize that, and I don’t even know where to start.’

“I also talked to an appraiser from Cabell County, where they’ve pretty much TIF-ed all of Huntington, and he said he would help me, too. He will talk with my appraiser if he needs help with that. But we haven’t got to that point yet.”

Yokum, like Kesling and Siler, said she believes city officials should have contacted the county much earlier about their TIF application.

“I got an email from Jessica Sutton the day before they had the public hearing (on Jan. 5) on the application, when I was out of town… saying, ‘Hey, we need this information. I’m assuming you know about this.’ My response was, ‘No, I did not know about this. And I will address this next week when I’m back in the office.’ I didn’t even know where to start.

“So the next week I called her, and I said, ‘Jessica, this conversation that we’re having should have happened months ago.'”

Both Sutton and Elkins Mayor Jerry Marco told The Inter-Mountain this week that the county was informed of the TIF application process in November, both by first-class mail and by email.

Sutton added that preparing the TIF application has been a learning process for her, as well.

“This is a project that I’ve been primarily involved in, and I’ve learned a lot,” Sutton told The Inter-Mountain this week. “I didn’t know very much about TIFs either, until we started discussing it. So it’s been a good learning experience.”

The Tax Increment Financing Act was passed by the West Virginia Legislature in 2001 and has been amended several times in the years since.

A City of Elkins presentation about TIF projects to Elkins City Council in October pointed out that the cities of Wheeling and Huntington established TIF districts in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

Wheeling issued TIF bonds in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2016. Huntington issued TIF bonds in 2006 and 2019.