Chillicothe Mayor Luke Feeney told City Council on Monday, November 9, that city revenue is now feeling the pain of last year’s paper mill closing, as council met in its new home at the renovated armory in Yoctangee Park, the Scioto Post reported in coverage by Kevin Coleman. The briefing put the mill’s long shadow at the center of the city’s budget picture heading into the new year.
The former Pixelle paper mill was Chillicothe’s largest employer inside the city, and its shutdown removed a major source of the income tax the city depends on to fund government. In an earlier briefing reported by WCHI, Feeney estimated the mill’s income-tax contribution at about $1.4 million to $1.5 million — roughly 8 percent of the city’s total income tax — and said the general fund had reserves while various other department funds did not.
That earlier guidance, reported by WCHI, had departments calculating a 20 percent cut in operational expenses other than personnel as the city began compiling its budget, and had Feeney working with the City Auditor on projections and scenarios for the mill’s impact on city funding. Monday’s briefing, as reported by the Scioto Post, indicates that planning is now meeting actual revenue.
The mill site itself remains in transition. U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, in an October 31 letter to Feeney reported by J News Network, wrote that a buyer recruited for the site has restored 210 jobs in less than 12 months at wages equal to or greater than before, that paper production is set to resume by the end of the year, and that a $5.5 million commitment from the prior owner was secured for former employees, with $1 million already distributed. Those figures are Moreno’s claims in the letter, as J News Network reported them, and Feeney has disputed job-number accounts in the same exchange.
For residents, the stakes are practical: income-tax revenue pays for the day-to-day operations of city departments, and a shortfall of the size Feeney has described forces choices about services, reserves and spending across funds. The mayor has previously noted, in the WCHI-reported briefing, that Pixelle was also a very large consumer of city water, adding lost utility revenue on top of the income-tax hit.
Council heard the briefing in its new chambers at the armory — the same Yoctangee Park building where the city will host a public open house on data center standards on November 16, a separate discussion about the kinds of development that could one day help replace lost industrial revenue.
What happens next is the city’s budget work: department-level savings plans and auditor projections will shape the spending plan council must adopt, while the mill site’s promised return to paper production by year’s end — as Moreno’s letter described it — will be watched for whether restored jobs begin to refill the revenue the city has lost.