Paul Krutko SPARK

Ann Arbor SPARK CEO Paul Krutko (Ann Arbor News file photo)

(MLive File Photo)

Last year, the city of Ann Arbor allocated $75,000 of its general fund to Ann Arbor SPARK for economic development – a figure that represented just nine-one thousandths of SPARK's $8.2 million 2013 budget.

The city may not make those contributions to SPARK in the future if Ann Arbor City Councilmembers Jack Eaton and Sumi Kailasapathy have their way.

The two have proposed eliminating the city's $75,000 allocation for the economic development group and putting the money toward human services. Additionally, the two proposed eliminating about $125,000 in the budget of the Local Development Finance Authority, including money for SPARK's marketing efforts, to be used instead for future infrastructure improvements.

Paul Krutko, SPARK's CEO, said that he didn't understand why the city would want to pull its funding from SPARK because of the substantial return – in the forms of job creation and retention, and business investments – that SPARK has helped the city capture.

"We think there is a very strong reason to support SPARK from the city's perspective. The city is a key partner, the University (of Michigan) is a key partner, the governor was here as a business leader when it was founded in 2006," he said.

"What they thought was that no one had enough resources to do economic development on their own and that the power in this is that everyone in this puts money into the pot which would enable them to create a very powerfully effective economic development organization. We're not sure why a couple councilmembers would now put forth an amendment to take money away from SPARK because we have a team that's doing this where the whole community is subsidizing economic development inside the city of Ann Arbor."

Krutko said that in 2013, SPARK used the city's $75,000 to facilitate 14 projects within the city. It resulted in $21 million in investments and 752 jobs.

"So if you divide that against their investment, it's $280 in investment for every $1, and $100 jobs for every job created. We think that's kind of a bargain," he said.

"We think that there's a lot of support on the city council for SPARK. The reality of it is that $75,000 barely supports one position in SPARK. The business development team has delivered results in Ann Arbor."

City council will debate those and several other budget changes during Monday evening's city council meeting. Council could also potentially adopt it in the final budget for the 2014-15 fiscal year.