The Elizabethtown City Council met for their first meeting of the month Monday.
The first reading was held on ordinances setting 2026 city tax rates. City Attorney Ken Howard read the three ordinances, detailing the tax rate for motor vehicle and watercraft (11.6 cents per $100 assessed value), the franchise tax rate (0.025 percent on all eligible deposits), and the tax rate for real and personal property (10.5 cents per $100 assessed value). Elizabethtown Mayor Jeff Gregory said the first two rates are unchanged, while the property tax rate was lowered from 10.7 cents.
“So when you have people tell you all the time that we’re raising their taxes, we have actually lowered their real and personal property this year, and I think we did last year too, so it is not true if they tell you that,” Gregory said.
The first reading was also held on an ordinance that amends the zoning for 1010 and 1020 Prospect Pointe Drive from Neighborhood Commercial (C-2) to Regional Commercial (C-3).
The council approved a municipal order accepting a $139,720 bid from Schroeder Construction for sanitary sewer improvements on Yale Drive, and a municipal order revising the contract scope with Congleton Hacker for the SteelGrove Amphitheater to accommodate additional work.
“We got a donation from somebody that doesn’t want to take credit for it for $1 million to the City of Elizabethtown to go towards that project, and so what we planned on doing with that donation was to go ahead and finish paving those parking lots and then erecting a storage building that they desperately needed that we had cut out of the first design,” Gregory said.
The order notes that the authorized cost of the project remains at about $41 million.
In other meeting news, Elizabethtown Police Chief Jeremy Thompson said the EPD will be featured in a video for the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s annual conference along with the organization’s website. The city recognized 10 employees who recently completed their CDL certifications, four fire recruits who graduated from the EFD’s Recruit Academy, and two parks department employees who earned their certified playground safety inspector certifications.
The Elizabethtown City Council will next meet September 21.
