Naperville candidates discuss Ogden Avenue
As Naperville prepares to rebound from the recession, the city’s three mayoral candidates say a thriving Ogden Avenue corridor is key if they hope to build on the recent predictions of increasing sales tax revenues.
Incumbent Georg Pradel and challengers Doug Krause and Kenn Miller discussed their visions for the main thoroughfare during a Thursday night forum hosted by the Naperville Area Homeowners Confederation.
Councilman Doug Krause said the focus needs to be on attracting high revenue generating business to allow the city to keep property taxes level.
“We work with the Naperville Development Partnership,” Krause said. “We go out and try to find businesses that want to come here and work with them with incentives. I think it’s important that we want to make sure that we attract new business here. Ideally you want to make sure you get some more auto dealers because they generate more sales tax revenue than most other businesses, particularly on the sale of a car.”
Councilman Kenn Miller said the focus has got to be on West Ogden Avenue, calling it a “gem” of a situation.
“The corridor is our number one sales tax receipt generator,” he said. “What you see with the empty spaces is the dealers have built new facilities and moved around the corner. We want to keep that corridor mostly for automobiles because we’ve got a good thing going there. But certainly if that doesn’t happen in the next couple years, we need to look at other alternatives that may be symbiotic to the automobile dealerships.”
Incumbent Mayor George Pradel is also hopeful more car dealers will find Naperville a nice place to call home and said he would push for more incentives to pry them away from neighboring communities.
“I would love to see the car dealers get back in sync,” Pradel said. “It hasn’t been their fault in many cases because they had to scale back because of the economy and because of the sales of cars. If we work with the Naperville Development Partnership, we can encourage incentives as a council to bring in more car dealers if we can. If we can’t we need to focus on other commercial business to put something back on the tax rolls.”
The partnership, Pradel said, is a vital piece.
“I, as the mayor, go out and meet with the groups that they put together and take our staff and invite people to see the development opportunities we have in Naperville,” Pradel said. “We also need to encourage those (businesses) that stay here.”
Miller said he would call on his business experience with muti-million dollar companies and a couple of startups to identify potential companies that might be looking to move into or expand in Naperville.
“The mayor should use the credibility and clout of the office to be the driver of the development strategy,” he said. “We should target big businesses regional offices for relocation and small and mid-sized businesses for expansion. We have plenty of land available for new development, around I-88 especially.”
Krause said retention of businesses citywide should be the focus of the mayor, partnership and Naperville Area Chamber of Commerce.
“We should be working hand in hand, not only to attract new business but also to retain business and the biggest thing is using incentives,” Krause said. “We’ve done that to bring in Costco, Office Max, Crate and Barrel and most recently the people that purchased the Holiday Inn.”