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ELKINS -- The president of the Randolph County Commission on Wednesday said the mayor of Elkins personally attacked his character during the verbal sparring over the city's TIF application submitted to the state.
Mayor Jerry Marco provided The Inter-Mountain with an update this week on the city's TIF application. He also commented on several Elkins agencies being cut completely from the County Commission's 2024 budget last week.
Marco said he couldn't understand how Commission President David Kesling was not in favor of the TIF proposal when Kesling owns a bakery in Harrison County which is located in a TIF District.
Kesling told The Inter-Mountain Wednesday it was upsetting that Marco was coming after him "personally over private matters." Kesling added he had no clue that the bakery's location was in a TIF District when he decided to open it there.
"He's taking a policy issue on a professional level and attacking me and my business personally," Kesling said. "He's making it seem like I benefited monetarily from my business in Bridgeport that is in a TIF District, which is totally not true. I never knew that area was in a TIF District until Mr. Marco pointed out that it was."
Kesling said when he began his search for a new business, he wanted it to be within an hour's drive of Elkins. He added that the location he selected on Jerry Dove Drive in Bridgeport was approved by the Great Harvest franchise; Kesling also owns a Great Harvest bakery in Elkins.
"I could care less that the bakery in Bridgeport is in a TIF District," said Kesling. "I have franchise rights with Great Harvest from Fairmont all the way down to Lewisburg. We wanted to keep the next bakery an hour drive from Elkins. That's why we went with Jerry Dove Drive.
"I pay a very high rent there and I used my own personal money to fund that project. For the mayor to make it seem like I benefited from it monetarily from a TIF being there, is ridiculous."
Marco said in the article that he believes the county's funding cuts to Elkins Main Street and the Elkins Parks and Recreation were decisions motivated by anger over the city's TIF application, which if enacted, would result in some future tax money being rerouted from the county to pay for the city's renovation projects. That process would continue for the next 30 years.
"The city has a standard that if you request funding from them, you have to have that turned in within their budget cycle," said Kesling. "We use the same standard. Elkins Main Street has not had a director for over six months and we are not sure about the future of that organization.
"We did not get a funding request from them during our budget process. That's why we reallocated that money to the Elkins-Randolph Chamber of Commerce, which not only helps business within the city but the entire county. And we never got a funding request from the Parks and Recreation until March 20, after we approved our budget on March 16."
In the current budget, Main Street receives $25,000 and Parks and Recreation receives $24,000.
Kesling said every organization knows that there is a certain time when they need to have funding requests into the county. "Everyone else had their letter in, everyone knows when we do the budget," he said. "We are mandated by the state that we have to have everything for them by the end of March, and everyone knows that."
Kesling also said the commission publicizes when the budget meetings take place, and the official date of when the budget will be approved.
"It's out there for everyone to know," said Kesling. "Plus I recently read where the Elkins Parks and Recreation requested lowering the funding that they got from the city by almost $20,000. I thought, 'hey, they requested a decrease from the city and we never got a letter from them so they must not need the money.'
"We didn't get their request until after the budget was done, so we reallocated that money to the pool project and other areas of the county where we can help other parks, just not the ones of Elkins."
Kesling said he also feels the mayor has not been transparent about the TIF application from "day one," back when the commission first learned about it at a County Commission meeting in January.
"We had a gentleman from the community come in and talk about the TIF during public comment," said Kesling. "The mayor was at that meeting and came up afterward and I asked him what was the deal with the TIF. He said it was just where the city was applying for a bond, it's no big deal. I took him at his word that they were just applying for a bond and that it was no big deal."
Kesling said that he had the county's assessor look into the TIF application and that she found out the story behind it.
"We learned that the county tax dollars would be paying for those bonds, which left me with the feeling that the commission was misled by the mayor of Elkins about the TIF process," said Kesling.
"Once we found out about how the TIF process really works, we wrote a letter to the state requesting they deny the application because we don't feel that it's right that the county has no say in the application process, but county money will be used to fund city TIF projects… Whether it's a dollar, a hundred thousand dollars, or a million dollars, if it's county tax money, I'm going to fight to keep it."
The next Randolph County Commission meeting is scheduled for April 6 beginning at 1:30 p.m. at the James F. Cain Courthouse Annex.