IS IT TRUE OCTOBER 3, 2016

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IS IT TRUE that Mayor Winnecke told the local paper that the threat of a Police and Fire unions lawsuits concerning the Health Insurance offer to city employees will likely go forward as announced?  …we are glad to hear that the Mayor has decided to meet with members of the Police and Fire leadership today to discuss this issue?  …a trait of a good leader is to sit down with people adverse to his position and look for ways to compromise in order to resolve a problem?

IS IT TRUE reliable sources tell us that the projected enrollment for new Medical School will be around 200 not 2,000? …this is a developing story?

IS IT TRUE we been told that the Mayor, City Controller Russ Lloyd Jr, Missy Mosby, Connie Robinson, Dr. Dan Adams, Jonathan Weaver and Dan McGinn has known about the impending Employee Health Care deficits problems for over 2 plus years?

IS IT TRUE at last City Council meeting Councilwoman Anne Hargis CPA failed to ask an important question? …she should had asked “what are the unpaid bills in the General and Hospitalization Funds as of June 30, 2016 compared to 2015 which would affect the 2017 budget”?

IS IT TRUE that the unpaid bills in the General Fund at the beginning of 2016 was $6.1 million and two years earlier that amount was only $2.3 million? … we wonder why the only CPA on City Council has not noticed this trend but more importantly why hasn’t she spoke out about this issue  on the open floor of the Council?

IS IT TRUE it seems like the Council leadership (McGinn, Mosby and Weaver) answer to the City’s major financial challenges is to eliminated our Homestead Credits?

IS IT TRUE if City Council votes to reduce your Homestead Tax Credit by 2% in 2017 they will add around $500,000 to their coffers?  …if they have the political resolve to passed the Homestead Tax Credit ordinance we hope that they use this money to reduce the Employee Health care fund shortfall and not on a new Zoo exhibit?

 

IS IT TRUE when City Council reduces your Homestead Tax Credit your County Homestead Tax Credit taxe will also be reduced because the City control 67% of the vote on this issue?  …this simply means what the city decides on the Homestead Tax Credit the County must autonomically go along with what they decide?

IS IT TRUE if Council vote to take 2% from your Homestead Tax Credit  in 2017 it will effect  home owners County wide?  …the more valuable homes are located in the County which means they will be paying higher property taxes than the people living in the city?  …this is called taxation without representation?

IS IT TRUE that in the 2017 City Budget, the City Council has only $1,000 allocated for outside consultants?  … that Indianapolis’ Metro Council has two well paid full time financial analysts?

IS IT TRUE that former Councilman and Finance Chairman John Friend, CPA spent many hours not only analyzing the budget but also the ongoing expenditures of our City?  … he also submitted his analyses to the Council on a monthly basis as part of his regular duties without additional pay?

IS IT TRUE that Anna Hargis, CPA posted on her Facebook page the “ins and outs” of the City budget and the “How it works” mantra?   …to our knowledge Councilwoman Hargis has not submitted any financial analyses, i.e. monthly changes in fund balances compared to previous year changes to City Council?

FOOTNOTE: Todays READERS POLL question is: Are you getting sick and tired of our elected and appointed City officials playing political games with our hard earn tax dollars?

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53 COMMENTS

  1. “IS IT TRUE if you live within the City limits and Council vote to take 2% from your Homestead Tax Credit you’re really be losing about 4% (2% from City and 2% from County) of your Homestead Tax Credit?”

    Nice try, but that’s not how it works. Same rate countywide.

    • Regardless. What is not working is that this Mayor and his controller, Russ Lloyd, Jr has failed this community financially. Reliable sources indicated that the only change in the budget from Winnecke is a spending increase in the General Fund of over $500,000 ..oddly, that is actually what the value of the reduction in our Homestead crdit would be. You would think we had a bunch of east coast liberals running this show.

      • Per Ms Hargis’ rendition concerning the budget, etc as posted on her facebook, why has she not noticed the illegal transfer of the $12,500,000 from the Riverboat money to the General Fund and the revelation that only 4 million is left after six months???? Of course, she will go to Russ Lloyd, Jr and he will blow sunshine up her ass.

    • Gene

      Thanks for correction and it has been duly noted.

      Just corrected our post.

      Please read our correction because we know you will agree with it.

      Thanks

      Editor

  2. After the death by neglect of Mesker Amphitheater, the loss of the Homestead Tax Credit would be another huge black eye to our City.

    • Lincoln was a visionary. He once said, “our nation would never be defeated from some transatlantic power but should defeat come, it will be from within ..”

    • These are the States where the non-citizen percentages are in double digits:

      1. Arizona…………………………………..10%

      2. California………………………………..13%

      3. Nevada……………………………………10%

      4. New Jersey………………………………..11%

      5. New York………………………………….10%

      6.Texas………………………………………..11%

      The Trump campaign staff would do well to monitor these States as being the most likely to have high rates of election fraud.

      • What campaign staff? He has virtually no ground game. He doesn’t want to win the presidency. He wants to stir up people like you and continue the message that the President is not legitimate and create a massive audience for his new media channel.

        • If he has nothing, then why is he kicking the crap out of Hillary? Have you taken your meds today?

          • He is not kicking the crap out of Hillary. Hillary is ahead of him in the polls. She’s taking an even higher lead since the debate ended. Trump was a disaster in the debate and his tweets after the debate sunk him to an even lower level. He’s losing and he knows it and he is going to start crying soon. He will come up with all kinds of little boy excuses such as his microphone was broke or the debate and election is rigged. And people like the woman in elkaybee’s post above might just fall for it. Here is to hoping that there are not as many people like that woman as there others who see though all that BS that Trump spews out of his dirty mouth. Donald Trump is a evil dirty man who would stoop so low that it’s actually unprecedented.

        • IIT that Donald Trump is a Russian Plant? A fifth Columnist? A Russian Spy? Hey two can play at this throw enough mud on the wall and see if any of it sticks game. I’m just showing you how crazy the stuff the Trump supporters say about Hillary is. They say much worse than what I said at the beginning of this paragraph.

          I don’t watch Fox New nor do I listen to Russ Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. So I just ignore the BS that they say on a daily basis. But they are reaching millions of Americans through the airwaves and they are causing a lot of problems with their lies and enuendos about this Country. If this were Russia or any other country that didn’t have a free press they would all be in the gulag by now. And I was always wondering why so many people think that Hillary is a liar or a crook. Well after reading that article above in the link that elkaybee posted it’s sinking in the amount of damage that these idiots have done to our country.

          When Reagan’s Supreme Court Nominees got rid of the Fairness Act Regulation and Fox News was created by a Foreign Guy from England and Hire the Women hating Roger Ailes the world changed here in the USA. The lies that are being told by these broadcasting companies which are owned by the Rich is starting to effect too many people.

          When people think that Michael Obama is really a man or that the kids are adopted and that the President is a Muslim and gay it’s getting out of hand. I’ve met what otherwise seemed like ordinary good people suddenly start acting like Loonies when they start to talk about the President. They called him a Muslim and a POS and walk away. I don’t want anything to do with those kind of people with that much hatred in their hearts. But someone needs to stop this nonsense and BS. Right now the GOP Controlled Senate is sitting on the Presidents US Supreme Court Nomine and nothing is being said about that only weeks before the election. This is all because the Senator from the State of KY doesn’t have to come back up for re election for another Six years. He knows that the people don’t have that long of a memory and this incident will be long forgotten by the time he has to run for his Senate seat again. He stubbornly will not even allow a hearing on the Presidents Nomine! And it appears that no one really care about this in the Media. To me this is one of the biggest stories of this election. A US Supreme Court with only 8 member. What if that had happened when the Case of Gore Vs Bush went to the Court? We would have still been counting ballets in Florida if that were the case.

          • Trump isn’t a direct agent of another country, I hope. He is just a money-grubbing opportunist who can’t keep the birther thing stirred up with Obama leaving office, so he has to illegimize Hillary. He doesn’t care about the strife he causes in America by encouraging the deplorables to doubt that the election was fair. They’ll watch his new channel instead of Fox and help to avenge the firing of the repulsive Roger Ailes.

          • Elkaybee. I was being factious and copying the type of BS that Trump spews out of his campaign and twitter account on a daily basis. I was trying to show what it would be like if we took the low road as Donald John Trump does.

            I know he’s not a Russian agent but people that follow Trump believe just about anything he says. Like he once said that he could kill someone in the streets and his followers would still vote for him. He’s absolutely crazy . My post was meant to show what crazy looks like. It meant to be a Satire of the trump man.

  4. What is not being disclosed to the Police and Fire personnel is at Midnight December 31, 2017, Obamacare eliminates all grandfather group plans. What does that mean? Well, the total expansion of coverages. For example, why would a male need to be covered for female issues and vice versa. Some experts predict that health plans will see increases in cost near 80%. Being self-insured to the stop-loss levels, Evansville will probably not see these extremes, but, one thing is for sure, the self-insured plans will see the tickle down effects. Winnecke knew about this over three years ago ..why..because they used ONB as the managing consultant.

  5. As reported, Winnecke states that a hand full of employees were causing the health care cost to be out of control and now those employees have either died or left employment. But, here is the alarming truth. The demographies of the average Evansville employee is: 55% have high blood pressure, 43% have high cholesterol, 38% smoke, (national avg is 23%) over 30% have either Type I or II diabetes (national avg 22%), and nearly 40% are considered extremely over weight and the average age is 53. So, what is the over/under on the bet that those hand full of employees that either died or left employment will be replaced with even more ..Winnecke fails miserably in anticipating Murphy’s law.

    • This is not the impression Tim Ethridge editorialized over the weekend. He said this was a one year happening. Mr. Ethridge would not mislead us!

      • Sunny, I don’t think Tim Ethridge lied in yesterday’s Editorial . . . it’s just that he can’t see the Big Picture.

        The Big Picture is not the change in employee health costs per month, the real story is:

        1) If the current family health contribution is just $ 83/month, as reported, then why have the taxpayers been subsidizing the city employees’ health care with our own tax dollars ? Even the proposed new rate of $ 224 per month for family health insurance is lower than market !;
        2) Why doesn’t the City have any cash reserves when an “emergency” arises ? “Emergency’, used loosely, here means the self-insured claims were $ 30 Million actual vs. $ 24 Million budget. Since there are no cash reserves, this becomes an emergency !; and
        3) How could the City Administration/Fithian’s group not have some type of stop loss insurance in place to prevent 18 people from racking up $ 7 Million of claims? Even at a specific stop loss peg of $ 100,000 per person, that would have saved $ 5 Million less stop loss premium.

    • This information shines a light on why the insurance rates are so high. I believe that there are some sort of fitness requirements for most of the city jobs that require any kind of strenuous work. I wonder if those have been enforced.

    • And they all live in an area with high levels of Air Pollution and especially high levels of Air Toxic in this Ohio River Valley. These are the hidden cost of bad air coming to roost.

      This reminds me of an old commercial. The you can pay me now or pay me later commercial. I can’t remember what it was about. But it dealt with some type of preventative maintenance plan of some kind. Like if you have termites and you fail to pay the Terminix Guy to get ride of them. After a while your house collapses and you end up paying a lot more to fix the house or rebuild it. It’s like buying insurance and paying a little each month or year so that when the storm comes and the tornado rips your home apart you have insurance money to rebuild it. It’s like putting oil in your cars engine every 3000 miles or else you end up buying a new car when your engine craps out due to dirty oil or no oil.

      Now if you don’t clean of the Air Pollution we end up paying more in health care costs and deaths and disease. It’s been predicted by the epidemiologist and other professionals in the field. Medical experts have told us that Air Pollution causes more heat disease and lung disease and we don’t listen to them. We ignore them. Now the true costs of not controlling the pollution are coming to roost and will haunt us in our sleep. The figures you posted are just the tip of the iceberg.

      I posted earlier about trying to control some of the health risks so as to try to lower the costs of health care insurance and the costs of health care itself. A healthy employee who does NOT smoke, Exercises, Is not over weight and eats healthy is going to cost less to insure than the opposite kind of employee.

      Is smoking allowed inside the Civic Center? When you go to the Civic Center how many people do you see sitting at a desk and that are overweight? How many of those people do you think have type II diabetes or heart disease that’s not diagnosed yet? Does the Mayor encourage the people who work for him at the Civic Center to get out and exercise? Does the Civic Center have a gym where the employees can exercise after work? I know that the Mayor wants badly to have a new Hotel with a Bar so that they can go distress after work and have a couple of Three Martini Lunches during the work week. The 20 million dollars that the Mayor talked the City Council into giving to a Private Out of Town Developer would have easily helped to pay for the Firemen and Policemen and women to have a 3% raise this year.

    • I can only address your employee statistics partially, anecdotally, and specifically for the EFD, but with those caveats…

      It appears to me that the number of firefighters who are also smokers is at an all-time low, at least since I’ve been on. It is not uncommon to find fire stations where not a single person assigned there on any shift is a smoker. This is probably a function of several things. We’ve had a large number of guys retire in the past 20 years, and their replacements have been younger guys and gals who mostly don’t smoke. Also, we’ve got alot more information on what a huge health double whammy it is to be a smoker AND a firefighter. Just being a firefighter increases your odds of certain cancers by a huge percentage, add smoking and you’re almost guaranteed to get the big C, so some people who used to smoke have stopped.

      We get annual physicals as well, and I can attest that the BMI charts we use label almost everybody on the fire department as overweight or obese. A firefighter who is 6′ tall and weighs 190 lbs is officially ‘overweight’ per BMI, and it doesn’t matter if he can run a marathon, bench press 300 pounds, and has 5% bodyfat. Every single person on my truck is either overweight or obese based on these charts, and they are also some of the strongest, most fit guys I know. Some statistics can be misleading…

      • DeltaBravo:
        Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad that the firemen have less smokers than in the past. I wish that I had never smoked. I too went into burning buildings a few times and understand the dangers that you guys have to face on a daily or weekly basis. I’ve been analyzing Bulk Asbestos Samples for over 30 year and have found asbestos fibers in a number of buildings. It’s in the ceiling tiles, floor tiles and roof shingles and it’s released when the building is demolished by fire. Breathing those particles into the body can cause the body’s lung tissue to form scare tissue and some times depending on the dose of the exposure create lung cancer or colon cancer. So it’s very important for you guys to know this going into a fire. Personal Breathing apparatus help but a good wash down after exiting the fire helps too. And I’ve seen the Chief fight hard to get better washing machines to help protect his brother firemen. That is very good and very important.

        And I’ve noticed that the Chief is physically fit and exercised a lot. So that too is a great thing. I’m glad to see that the guys are following his example and keeping fit. I’m sure that they all realize how important physical fitness is for the job they all do so well.

        I agree with you about the BMI index. The shorter in stature one is the easier it is to be classified as Obese. I’ve read that the area we live in had an impact on our BMI. Excessive pollutions in the air and water can effect our bodies in many ways.

        Now some Statistics can be misleading but most of the time the calculation account for things that skew the results.

        The guys on the Fire Dept are the most appreciated men working for the city. The police and firemen are the backbone of this city.. make that any city in America.

        But not back on topic. Something needs to be done to help the firemen and women get better health coverage and lower their cost. The Mayor seems to be doubling down on his first proposal. I hope he changes his mind and starts looking for new ways to lower the cost of the City’s Workers Health Insurance.

  6. It just seems like yesterday when McGinn stated, “our finances are on sound ground” If he knew how to read the Annual Report for 2015, he would have discovered that the General Fund expenditures exceeded the revenue by $12,200,000. This is why Winnecke illegally transferred the advancement of $12,500,000 received from Tropicana from the Riverboat to the General Fund. We need to keep our eyes open on how the State Board of Accounts will be disclosing this illegal transaction. Of course, keep your eyes open to Winnecke’s failure to properly transfer the money from the General Fund to the Hospitalization fund to pay the medical bills. This will be in the hood of $5,000,000.

    • If Russ Lloyd, Jr was the CFO for a publicly-traded corporation and not the City of Evansville you would wonder if the SEC would be investigating violations of the Sarbane-Oxley Federal Law??? What a master of manipulation. Ms Hargis you better beware!!!

      • If she knows what’s going on and does not say anything is she being complicit or is she in on the fix? Makes me wonder if she is just too scare to fight them. She saw what they did to SBR and that was not a pretty sight. Many people supported people like Rick Davis and SBR and then the revolution stalled and the same old cronies are in power day after day. Good people don’t last long in the world of dirty Politics from what I’ve seen over the last 40 years since I came of age.

    • Even if it were illegal to do this who’s going to enforce any penalties against the Mayor for doing that? And what are the penalties for doing such an so called illegal act? If there are no illegalities or penalties then he or the next Mayor will continue to act this way. Now I bet if it were really illegal to transfer money from one account to another and there were real penalties then he would have been in jail by now. Sort of like if Hillary had really lied to the FBI she would be in jail now. So it’s probably not really illegal.

      I think that the past city council passed a “Resolution” saying that they would not spend the River Boat Monies on anything other than capital goods. Thing like new police cars and fire engines and new buildings etc. But that was not a law. And there are no real penalties other than it might look bad to the tax payers at election time. But the Former Mayor and the Current Mayor are probably counting on the voters to not show up at the polls or to have bad memories and forget about this by the time the next election arrives. When only a small percentage of the people living in town are registered to vote and then only a small percentage of those registered to vote actually go to the polls to vote then the Mayor doesn’t have much to worry about.

  9. Is it True that the City does not have to let out for bids any Professional Consulting Service Contracts. Such as environmental audits on properties such as the old Gray Hound Bus Station or any other building that is being remodeled or demolished? Professional Environmental Inspections can cost a lot of money. And if there is only one company doing this over and over again and it’s kept out of the public eye when the contracts are give the cost of the projects can be even higher.

    So are they bidding out the jobs for Health Care Consultant or Environmental Consultants and how much money does the city budget for Professional Consulting Service each year?

  16. Press:
    Do you want to bet that Trump wins? I’d bet you that Hillary will be him like a wet noodle.

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