As John Weicker finishes his final two months of school, he’s counting down the days with a small ticker in his office.On Thursday, the counter read 44 days, plus a few hours, minutes and seconds.FORT WAYNE – The Allen County Fort Wayne Capital Improvement Board of Managers said goodbye Thursday to founding president Ben Campbell and hello to new member and president Nancy Jordan.
Campbell, executive vice president of commercial banking at STAR Financial Bank, has led the board since it was created in 2009. His work, however, is taking him to Indianapolis.
The board collects some state income and sales taxes from IPFW, Grand Wayne Center, Memorial Coliseum and the Holiday Inn near the Coliseum, but the bulk of its funding comes from any county food and beverage tax revenue that is not needed to finance Coliseum debt.
The board received $3.1 million in early 2011 and $1.1 million in 2012. It is expected to accumulate up to $85 million over the next 17 years. The revenue the board controls is intended to pay for large, capital projects in the community. Requests for funding began in August with the launch of the board’s website, www.allencountycib.org.
Jordan is a senior vice president at Lincoln Financial Group.
“This is a huge honor,” Jordan told the board. “It means a lot to me personally, but I think it means a lot to Lincoln, as well.”
Like Campbell, Jordan is a member of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Economic Development Alliance board, and she served on the economic development team of Fort Wayne’s Legacy Task Force.
The board also unanimously rejected a request from Indiana Tech for $510,000 toward a multidisciplinary assistance center for business startups in the university’s planned $15.7 million academic center building it expects to open in August 2014.
Investment Committee Chairman Steve Brody said board members liked the project, but found that rather than transformational, it was similar to existing projects at IPFW and the University of Saint Francis. There were also concerns that the request was for all of the cost and there was little chance, if any, of recapturing the funds later for other uses.
“It’s no knock on Indiana Tech,” Brody said. “They’re doing great things over there.”
In January, the board denied an Indiana Tech request for $1 million toward its $16 million law school.
