Lake Delhi overwhelmingly approves bond issue

CEDAR RAPIDS - Owners of Lake Delhi homes and cottages voted themselves a substantial tax increase Tuesday to help pay for rebuilding the failed dam that cost them their lakefront property.

By a vote of 836 to 43, they passed a proposal to issue up to $6,091,104 in general obligation bonds to help pay for the dam rebuilding. The 95.1 percent approval margin was well above the 60 percent supermajority required for passage.

“The Lake Delhi community has made its commitment. We have a lot farther to go, but I am confident we are going to get there,” said Steve Leonard, president of the Lake Delhi Combined Recreational Facility and Water Quality District, the lake area's official governing body.

Lake Delhi leaders have repeatedly said approval of the bond issue is a prerequisite for securing state and county financial assistance for the rebuild effort, which they estimate will cost more than $10 million.

“The message this sends is, ‘we're going to invest in ourselves because we want our lake back,'” said Bill Decker, a 23-year Lake Delhi resident. “We don't expect somebody else to do everything for us,” he added.

“It seems kind of odd to vote yourself a tax increase, but that's what was needed,” said Marcheta Cooey, a Lake Delhi pioneer whose family has been in the resort business at Lake Delhi since shortly after the dam was built in 1929.

Lake Delhi residents will pay about $450,000 a year for 20 years to retire the bonds, according to Larry Burger of Speer Financial, the Waterloo firm hired to help the taxing district secure the bonds.

Residents of the taxing district already pay $4 per $1,000 of assessed valuation under a special levy whose proceeds are used primarily to retire debt from previous lake dredging projects.

The additional cost to the owner of a house with an assessed value of $100,000 will be about $586 a year, Burger said.