LAHARPE — Harry Lee Jr., LaHarpe’s newly minted mayor, sounded a call to arms Wednesday.
Lee spoke at the outset of the City Council’s monthly meeting, asking LaHarpe’s citizenry to help address the city’s biggest need — to get more homes built, and to get more folks to live in them.
Lee started his message with a pair of questions.
“How many of you get really excited and feel good about raising property taxes?” he asked.
Nobody raised their hand, nor did they with his follow-up: “How many get really excited and supportive of raising utility rates?”
Both are occurring, simply through attrition, Lee said, using his neighborhood as an example.
Lee drew up a small diagram of his street, which formerly had six houses between him and U.S. 54. Today there are three, pointing to LaHarpe’s shrinking population.
Yet while there are fewer people living in town, the city’s expenses do not drop accordingly, leaving fewer people to pay higher rates.
“We’ve effectively raised our property taxes and our utility rates because we’ve lost people, we’ve lost valuation in our city.”
Finding the solution is the tricky part.
There’s little a city can, and should do, to get people to want to move to LaHarpe, Lee argued.
“Is that the city’s responsibility, or is it our responsibility?” he asked the audience. “It’s ours.”
He suggested residents can do much to make LaHarpe more appealing by doing three simple, but significant tasks: clean up LaHarpe, keep up LaHarpe, and finally, paint up LaHarpe.
The city can enforce nuisance ordinances, but otherwise has little power to prompt residents to maintain their properties, Lee and City Attorney Fred Works both noted.
But when residents are active in cleaning their properties, maintaining their properties, and finally sprucing up their properties, it makes the town more appealing for those looking to relocate.
Councilwoman Angela Barker agreed with Lee’s synopsis, but noted there were a couple of significant needs still out there.
