The city of Ashland grew as the city council annexes the Whitetail Estates just southwest corner of Highway 6 and 66.
It was an unanimous 4-0 vote.
This vote makes way for a development encompassing roughly 150 homes, commercial and the city’s first hotel.
But for weeks a group of citizens and the Ashland-Greenwood school board are against using tax increment financing to help the developers get water and sewer into the underdeveloped land.
The opponents say they were disappointed in the city council’s decision to move forward with the annexation.
“Personally I’ve never seen this much controversy in Ashland,” said Bob Luebbe who thinks this use of TIF isn’t the way it should be used when talking about the property, “Nice productive farmland and use TIF to turn it into a housing development-that's not what the intent of the law was.”
However each of the city council members said this was a big decision and they each did their due diligence before casting their vote.
The amount of TIF for the project lowered from an estimated $2 million to $1.79 million.
Developers say the next step is to go through the redevelopment plan and construction could start within the next 6 weeks.
