Seeking Alternative Funding
As one final project before I retired from the city of Elko New Market, Minn., I was asked to scan the nation for potential revenue sources for evaluation, and make recommendations to diversify our current revenue base for future park projects.
As has been well-documented, most cities depend primarily on property taxes and programming revenue to fund their operating budgets; our city was no different. To do more, we needed new sources of operating fund revenue for park department facilities and programming, as well as the enhancement of those primary sources of revenue.
The goal was to identify, evaluate, and prioritize possible new revenue sources by focusing on smaller, additional, stable sources that would increase operating budget funds.
The first step was to develop criteria to evaluate and prioritize the sources: