The City of Kiel will retain its Business Improvement District (BID) and appoint a different representative.
The city council held a discussion on Tuesday night (September 9th) after Alder Kathy Schutte accused the BID of moving $8,000 from their budget to the Kiel River Walk District, claiming it was tax dollars.
She claimed that there wasn’t appropriate communication or documentation on how money had been spent by the BID and that they didn’t go through a committee.
Schutte was the representative from the council on the Kiel Business Improvement District board, but the council voted to approve her resignation after issues she brought up.
Members of the BID and Kiel River Walk District asked the council to keep it in place, including Mary Christel from Christel’s Pet Supplies.
“Let’s move forward,” she exclaimed. “We’ve got a great downtown going here as you can see. I don’t think there’s anyone sitting behind me that wants the BID to go away.”
City Administrator Dave Funkhouser said there were other allegations from Alderman Schutte during a Committee of the Whole meeting, saying there was fraud in the BID’s budget, and that he had something to do with it.
Funkhouser said he took personal offense to the accusations, saying that if needed, he would happily have an audit on the BID fund.
“For the records I’ve reviewed, the BID board by their bylaw or by their operating procedures, two members sign off on the receipts, the funds are paid out of the BID account and paid to any invoices that come forward,” he explained. “This in my opinion was a nuclear option, a completely unwarranted reaction to a simple thing that could have been solved with a phone call and an explanation.”
Funkhouser was also unhappy that he hadn’t been consulted about the Business Improvement District plan, and that Schutte was one of the people who voted on their budget.
The city administrator said that the $8,000 move never happened as Schutte claimed.
The Kiel City Council eventually approved not ending the Business Improvement District and approved the resignation of Schuette from the Business Improvement District board.
