HOGANSVILLE – On Monday night, the Hogansville City Council heard information on refinancing existing city debt with a bond agreement.

“This has been an item that has been in the works for a considerable amount of time, and certainly you’ve heard of the potential for escalating costs that we are starting to see in construction costs,” City Manager David Milliron said. “What the city has had to wait for was for the previous hold hostage. It’s the $5,000 check that the city had to write in order to be able to go in and renegotiate and look at the full picture of the lease of the bond.

With that having occurred with the city finally writing that check now, it is my understanding that we finally have gotten an approval to move forward.”

The hostage agreement allowed the city to proceed with the USDA sewer line deal, but it will not be necessary to have a similar agreement with this bond. 

The city will eventually need to take action to fill gaps in the USDA funding, but the council was hesitant to make any decision before they have all the facts.

“We are not ready here to take any kind of action on this manner, and I think that we need to have a work session on this as soon as possible to go over all of why we have to do this now,” Mayor Bill Stankiewicz said. “Again, I know there is a need to finance the shortfall in the USDA financing for the wastewater treatment plant. One of the issues is, we have an alternative, and that is additional USDA funds. It doesn’t necessarily have to be these funds.”

Larry Kidwell of Kidwell and Company insisted strongly that the city attempt to pass the agreement before the end of the year in order to lock in rates, but the city council felt that they did not have enough information to proceed as of Monday night.

The city council discussed scheduling a work session to discuss the details of the agreement sometime next week.

However, the date and time were not set during Monday’s council meeting.