Coopersville Prepared For Worst
COOPERSVILLE — As the city of Grand Rapids was reeling from news that its largest taxpayer, Steelcase Inc., was shuttering its Grand Rapids facilities, Coopersville was polishing off a worst-case scenario of its own.
In May, City Manager Steven Patrick presented to the city council a $2.1 million budget to be used if its largest taxpayer, Delphi Corp., shut its doors.
“If you take 24 percent out of your budget, it’s going to be a large impact,” Patrick said last week. “The point was to get people thinking about what services are critical to the community…If you have ‘x’ amount of dollars, where do you want those to go?”
Patrick compared the mock budget to the Price of Government exercise used this summer by state legislators.
The mock budget — which presented a choice between across-the-board cuts and targeted cuts eliminating positions and scaling back services — assumed a loss of real property tax revenues from a plant shutdown. In this model,
The scenario did not include the true worst-case scenario, Patrick said, that
Luckily, neither of these situations appears to be forthcoming, Patrick said. The plant is currently profitable, employees are working overtime, quality is high and it is still in the process of installing a brand new assembly line.
However, the same model can be used to absorb a similar reduction in revenue, such as the concurrent closing of several smaller companies or a drastic cut in state revenue sharing, he said.
