IS IT TRUE it appears now that when you account for the debt servicing of the bond issue over the 25 years ($2.6 Million x 25 years) this project will actually commit tax payers to the minimum of $65 million?…when you add the $13 Million already paid to clear the Executive Inn or the massive construction interest and legal fees associated with the project the taxpayer damages on this gamble is massive exceeding $78 Million?… the City is downplaying the fact that Evansville is the biggest investor here in releasing costs of $38Million from the investors from Branson and $37.5 Million from the taxpayers of Evansville?…that casinos operate with rules that return up to 99% of every dollar pushed through electronic games of chance?…if any one of us could find a SUGAR DADDY that is dumb enough to match our investment in casino action dollar for dollar we would be statistically guaranteed to walk away a big winner?…in such a scenario where $75 Million was in play, the casino would win their standard operating margin, the receiver of the matching funds (HCW) would win big, and the idiot that matched the casino play (City of Evansville) would be guaranteed to lose their entire investment?
IS IT TRUE According to the Hunden study (the $105,000 City study upon which it relies), the new hotel will be filled only 30% by the new business generated due to conventions; so the remaining 70% will need to come from existing heads in beds that must be stolen from existing Evansville hotels?…if our hotels lose this business because of this need to attract patrons that would otherwise have stayed in an existing hotel, jobs at those hotels will be lost?…based on the numbers from the Hunden Study we will amend our estimate yesterday of 55 – 65 jobs created down to more like 20 – 25 net new jobs created by the new hotel?…taking $37.5 Million from the taxpayers to create 25 permanent low wage jobs and 150 temporary construction jobs makes the Obama Stimulus look like an economic success story?…it even makes Solyndra look like a success story since they did actually employ about 1,000 people for two years before filing for bankruptcy?…of all the possibilities considered during the 2011 Mayoral election, the Winnecke Administration making President Obama’s economic performance look superior was not something anyone even thought possible?
IS IT TRUE Bob Warren, the CVB director has spoken about how convention planners will now come to Evansville?…that is a complete misstatement according to the industry EXPERTS the City of Evansville hired to do a study of such things?…according to the Hunden study the majority of planner’s poled – 60% – said they will NOT consider Evansville for their conventions?…40% said they would likely consider Evansville?…in other words, doing this project gets less than half of those planners to just consider Evansville – nothing more?…there is more than just a hotel that will keep convention planners from considering Evansville for conventions?…we may need to consider something other than conventions and ball games as our economic savior?…infrastructure that works is something that has held Evansville back for years and it continues to do so no matter how many ball fields, hockey rinks, or skateboard parks we may build?…this is a failed policy of people mired in the 60’s and devoid of any knowledge about trends and technology?
IS IT TRUE the CCO Moles are telling us of several instances of intimidation attempts directed at board members of the CVB by members of the Vanderburgh County Council designed to get the City of Evansville’s paws on $3.5 Million of the Innkeepers Tax dollars that were in play for soft balls fields?…to use the hand of government to take Innkeeper’s Taxes from the hands of existing hoteliers to give to a competitor is right out of the playbook of Lenin, Brezhnev, and Stalin?…Karl Marx founded the Communist Party on the premise that “we (the central planners) take from each according to their abilities and redistribute as we choose according to needsâ€? …the American veterans who have fought and died to stop the spread of communism are most likely rolling over in their graves in amazement at the audacity of the government of an American city to take from one businessman to fund his competitor?…this is an insult to the Constitution and our free enterprise system?
Editor,
You are right. This deal IS an insult to the Constitution and the people who died fighting communism.
What’s sickening is we seem to have a City Council completely filled with establishment peons more interested in asking only questions about the degree to which we violate the dictates of free market capitalism rather than whether we should do it at all! I would say it’s insulting to the intelligence of the people of Evansville, but that would be giving the people of Evansville perhaps a little more credit than they seem to deserve.
I agree the net increase in jobs, at least temporarily, will be about 20-25 permanent and maybe 150 construction. The Hunden Study agrees in large part with the statements I made about not creating demand simply by overproducing a good or service.
I have a novel idea…How about we take the $37.5 million and just divide it up between 175 random lottery winners in the City of Evansville. Each lucky winner will receive about $215,000! We could save all the debt servicing fees and everything else you mentioned by just giving people the money rather than some out-of-state developer, who will pocket it and run after five years anyway.
Correction, we’d still have the debt service fees in this novel approach to stimulus, but maybe we could dictate to the lottery winners of government assistance that they must spend their spoils in Evansville only. That will cycle this debt-generated money back into the local economy where it will further boost tax revenues and ensure we could repeat the cycle again. It’s genius. If only John Maynard Keynes had thought of it we might have stopped the Great Depression before 1945.
I’m glad the County Council is putting pressure on the ECVB to ante up instead of using all their funds (including possible reserves) on the ball fields. I would absolutely love a shot at making up the difference in funds through MLB grants but neither Warren nor the ECVB will listen even though an entire neighborhood district is wanting this project with open arms while the current area doesn’t even care.
Not to mention, one neighborhood has baseball organizations who have already worked with MLB players and coaches on obtaining such funds and have expressed overwhelming enthusiasm towards doing it for these ball fields- even an architect/engineer is drawing up plans for it.
Bob Warren is a very nice man who I truly believe is just caught in too deep in a political fire storm even though I disagree with just about every decision the ECVB has made while he was in charge.
But if the County Council does not stop this current ball fields project, they will be wasting a ton of extra money that doesn’t need to be spent on this project, they will be approving the wrong location and therefore destroying the future of another, and they will be basically building a complex that will fail to live up to the potential it has should it be placed in the proper area.
While the Big Spenders,–and their concubines, push the “Big Lie”,
The CCO tells it like it is!
Bravo!
This whole deal sounds like REVERSE income redistribution.
If you like Obama you gotta love Winnecke. They are using the same playbook.
Take the County Option Income Tax (COIT) off the table as a source of revenue to service the bonds and the project is dead. You will not be able to peddle the bonds anywhere, period without COIT.
So now we are taxing local citizen’s INCOMES in order to GIVE AWAY FREE OF ANY CHARGE $37.5 Million to an out of town PRIVATE DEVELOPER!
Only in this town would politicians, at the behest of their multimillionaire controllers, be contemplating such idiocy.
___
Editor:
You are wrong on this statement (from above)”…to use the hand of government to take Innkeeper’s Taxes from the hands of existing hoteliers to give to a competitor is right out…”
“Innkeeper Taxes” do not belong to the current hotel owners any more than “Sales Taxes” is their money. The hotel only collects the money. It is not their money.
Wrong and wrong, Sir. Every service has a market value. Any taxation placed on a transaction disincentivises purchasing the product. In effect, that is revenue the taxing authority is stealing out of the transaction.
I have some economics books ill loan you if you’re interested.
Wayne,
and that collecting and processing costs money to do which lowers the effective rack rates of existing hotels and adds to their expenses. It is sort of like being forced to make the rope you are to be hung with when you are innocent. How a learned Republican could ever support such nonsense is a mystery.
Do you support the tax levied by ObamaCare on medical device companies? It is the same thing.
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