Naperville officials are looking at implementing fees for the Municipal Center meeting rooms now used by community groups for free. Some of them, along with representatives of some of those groups, oppose the move, one of several measures being put forth by staff for helping close a projected $1.8 million hole in the city budget.
A staff report presented to City Council members this week calls for charging $60 for use of the two meeting rooms in the basement of the building and $30 for renting the lunch room. Designed to cover the cost of having the rooms rearranged and cleaned before and after they’ve been used, the potential new fee structure is expected to bring in about $38,000 annually.
Speakers representing a writer’s group, an Italian heritage club and a regional genealogical society argued against introducing a fee for space they now use at no cost. They said the modest dues collected from members, if any, wouldn’t enable them to pay.
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Debra Scouten, president of the Fox Valley Genealogical Society, said the $25 annual fee paid by member families is needed for other purposes. The group now meets twice a month in the Municipal Center.
“We use our money for education, and it definitely would put a damper on what we can do for our members,” Scouten said.
Tim Yao, who volunteers with the local chapter of the writing group Nanowrimo, said his group charges no fee at all and urged that the city continue to do the same. Some of the aspiring novelists who take part in the program, numbering 524 last year, give freewill donations. But not all of them are able to do so, Yao said, suggesting that a room fee would be unfair.
“This community that we built will not be the same afterwards,” he said.
The Naperville Public Library collects up to $75 for allowing groups to use its rooms in 3.5-hour increments. The Park District fees range from $50 to $150 per hour, with a required deposit, and School districts 203 and 204 run as high as $80 hourly, according to figures provided by the city.
Although they acknowledged the community’s other taxing bodies already charge for room use, some council members don’t much like the idea.
“This is the people’s house, and it is wrong to charge the people to use that house,” Councilman John Krummen said.
Saying she was playing “devil’s advocate,” Councilwoman Patty Gustin said the modest amount of anticipated income might not materialize if it causes current users of the rooms to seek space elsewhere.
“I’m having a hard time making the leap that, ‘OK, if we charge it, they will pay and they will come.’ It’s not necessarily true. They just may not come,” Gustin said.
However, North Central College Professor and Councilwoman Judy Brodhead noted that the school sometimes charges hundreds of dollars in rental fees for certain spaces on the downtown Naperville campus. Brodhead was one of several council members who said it’s important that the city cover the expenses it incurs in opening the Municipal Center rooms to the community.
“This is not out of line at all,” she said.
Council member Kevin Gallaher agreed, though he proposed that a fee of $30 for each room – and $60 when the movable wall is taken out of the two meeting rooms to create one larger space – would be appropriate. He said he was surprised by the pushback officials have received from residents who heard of new fees being assessed at $30 to $40 per room.
“Free is always better. I’m not going to deny that, but $40 isn’t that much worse than free,” Gallaher said.
Noting that “there’s great value” in providing the community with a neutral territory at no cost, Councilwoman Rebecca Boyd-Obarski noted with reluctance that the time may have come to adjust the policy.
“I realize that maybe that is a perk that we can no longer afford as a community, and that saddens me,” she said.
The city has made other adjustments to address ongoing budget imbalances, including an agreement that will have residents paying directly for their garbage collection as of Jan. 1, 2016. The monthly fee will go from $2 to $12.35, saving the city an estimated $5 million annually. While he stressed that the overwhelming majority of the remaining $1.8 million fiscal gap will be addressed through spending cuts, City Manager Doug Krieger said the free rooms may be another area where something historically provided for free in Naperville may now need to come at a cost – even if it means losing some of the rooms’ current users.
“As we really look for areas where we’re an outlier, this was one that was very clear-cut. We’re the only game in town that’s zero,” Krieger said. “A small portion of those (setup and cleaning) costs may go away, depending on the change in usage, but from a fairness perspective, for the 95 percent of Naperville residents who never set foot in this building, right now they’re footing the cost, and wherever we can more closely match those with the actual users, and get closer to a user fee, that’s something that we are absolutely looking toward.”
City staff will come back with a formal proposal for a fee structure to be considered by the council at an upcoming meeting.
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