IS IT TRUE August 24, 2011

21

The Mole #??

IS IT TRUE August 24, 2011

IS IT TRUE that the new Executive Director of the Evansville Convention and Visitors Bureau addressed the Evansville City Council on Monday night regarding the subject of tourism?…that Bob Warren is a man who seems to have fallen in love with the concept that Evansville is a place that has a great amount of potential as a vacation destination?…that he went on and on about how Evansville is a great place to visit yet has never really shared that with potential visitors?…that when he started discussing the MARKETING BUDGET of the ECVB and comparing it to other cities in which he has worked in his career that all too familiar DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS look came upon the faces of our City Council members?…that the entire marketing budget for the Evansville Convention and Visitors Bureau to tell the world about how great Evansville (population 117,400) is for vacationing is $116,000?…that Mr. Warren’s previous place of work, the town (not city) of Galena, Illinois (population 3,500) had a marketing budget of $330,000?

IS IT TRUE that Galena is about the size of Chandler, IN or Morganfield, KY?…that these towns are no more than 3% of the size of Evansville?…that Galena’s marketing budget is TRIPLE the size of Evansville’s?…that the other places that he has worked are closer to the size of Evansville but spend in the millions of dollars per year to attract tourism?…that once again Evansville is exposed as being hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the cost of doing business in the outside world?…that this was reminiscent of the paltry wage scale that inspired Mayor Weinzapfel to propose a dual pay scheme to attract Tom Barnett to Evansville over a town of 3,000 people in Florida?…that in the recent ‘Competitive Realities” report from the SW Indiana Coalition for Economic Development the MARKETING BUDGET to attract new businesses was fingered for being hopelessly low?

IS IT TRUE that one of the 10 things identified by the CCO that need to be done right in 2011 was to upgrade municipal pay scales in the City of Evansville to national levels?…that having a marketing budget for tourism that is 1/3 of a place the size of Chandler is almost hard to believe?…that if the City of Evansville chooses to not even try to compete either through complete ignorance or disinterest that the population shrinkage will continue, the number of abandoned houses will increase, the local wage base will continue to decline, and we can continue to experience DEER IN THE HEADLIGHT MOMENTS at City Council meetings?…that our City Council should not be blindsided by things like this?…that our City Council is elected to do what is best for the people of Evansville?…that being completely oblivious to the economic reality of the modern world is not in the best interest of the people of Evansville?…that what scares us the most is that the City Council members really seemed to be surprised that a town the size of Chandler has a tourism budget that is TRIPLE Evansville’s?…that we wonder if they are surprised that a Colts ticket costs more than $3, that a beer at the game is more than a dollar, and that a bag of peanuts costs more than 50 cents at Lucas Oil Stadium?

IS IT TRUE that the street sweepers that are deployed for downtown are about an inch or so too tall to fit into the City of Evansville parking garages?…that this is a repeat performance of the performance out on a Diamond Avenue overpass a few years ago?…that the first suggestion at that time and again Monday was to deflate the tires?…that is a lame way to make up for the failure to get out the tape measure in the design stage?…that the DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS look is once again indicative of obliviousness?

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21 COMMENTS

  1. Why would Mr. Warren have accepted the Evansville job ? Surely he asked about the budget before taking the position ? Wouldn’t the fact that Galena, IL (3 % of Evansville’s size) has 3x the budget fall into the “buy a clue” category ? I am missing something on this one. In Mr. Warren’s line of work, Evansville would seem to be the Siberia where tourism officials are dispatched for official sanction.

    • Wonder what the budget for Galena was prior to Mr Warren taking the job? it’s hard to believe that their budget is 3x a much larger metro area without some influence to get it there….

  2. “IS IT TRUE that the street sweepers that are deployed for downtown are about an inch or so too tall to fit into the City of Evansville parking garages?…”

    ——

    A more interesting problem is that none of the city’s firefighting apparatus will fit either, that if you have a car fire in one of the garages that the firefighters are going to be “on foot” to get to the fire and limited to the equipment they can carry with them, hopefully no one will be trapped in the burning car.

  3. On my way to breakfast this morning, I measured all the parking garage openings, and found they are plenty tall enough to allow a crew of maintenance workers to enter armed with push brooms, wheelbarrows, and flat point shovels.

    • Great idea!, we have a jail that is slopping over with inmates that I’m reasonably sure are capable of using a broom even in leg irons,…not to mention cost to the public would be very low in such a program, transport, fuel, and shotgun shells are all ready in the budget. If we only had a consolidated police force we could get r done. 🙂

      • Good old Clarence used to keep the Walkway swept up pretty much all by himself, and without the leg irons, shotguns, or consolidation! Too bad we don’t have two or three Clarences to deploy to the parking garages once or twice a week.

        • A different/simpler time my friend when kids learned the pledge of allegiance, racial profiling was how crooks were caught, a man’s handshake and word had meaning, and political correctness was but a glimmer in a liberals eye.

          • Before that blatantly racist comment, I was wondering just what pocket of low caliber, hard right wingnuts were backing Davis for Mayor. Thankfully, the independent vote will be more moderate, and hopefully will carry Winnecke into the mayor’s office and sweep the Pick Rick Righties back under the rug they crawled out from.

          • Who? me…..the only comment I made is that police use to use racial profiling to catch crooks…ie if the report said it was a white guy (or black) they didn’t go looking for a Mexican.

            I always thought that “right-wing” was associated with republicans (like Winnecke) and “left-wing” was associated with democrats like Davis, has there been another flip-flop in terminology (or labels) that I missed the meeting on?

          • I equate “hard right wingnuts” with racist, redneck comments like “different/simpler times when racial profiling was how crooks were caught” and regardless of whether those comments come from Democrat rednecks or Republican rednecks since they all sleep in the same soiled bedding.

          • Blanger,

            I understand completely what you are trying to say.

            ClovisPoint used the racist card….Then profiles all rednecks by saying they sleep in soiled bedding….I’ll have you know Mr. Clovis…I wash my sheets on a regular basis.

          • Really…you have never had a conversation with a retired LEO about how crime was fought? or about how thing have changed in our new politically correct world? about how criminal profiling is done at the federal level but is considered tabu for local law enforcement?

            So you are saying that if a crime report says that a 6′ black male committed the crime they shouldn’t profile 6′ black males?

            Your comments are just as insulting as you claim mine to be, by insinuating that a poster (myself) is a right-wing this or a left-wind that and then trying to tie my post to be a Davis supporter which if you read my post yesterday you would have seen that I’m not a supporter of either candidates, but do believe Davis to be the lesser of the two evils.

            But you seem to jump at the chance to tie Davis to a comment you judge offensive, you need to try harder and find a comment that Davis himself makes to jump on….you somehow assume that everyone here is either a Davis supporter or a Winnecke supporter and I think you couldn’t be further from the truth…there are trolls from both camps here, and a lot of realists who call a spade a spade (and that’s not meant to be racial)

            Your opinion holds no more weight then mine and at the end of the day it is just that your opinion but If I have offended you in someway I do apologize, but I don’t apologize for my comments which I believe to be true.

          • My reaction to your comment is based on the fact that untold numbers of minority Americans have been wrongfully imprisoned and even put to death for crimes they did not commit, but were simply racially profiled for, and subsequently beat into confession. If evolution of thinking corrected that wrong doing, then I applaud the “political correctness” that rednecks loath.

            If you have a definition of racial profiling that makes you feel good about it or about yourself for whatever reason you need to feel good about it or yourself, then get on with it. I don’t have to agree and never will.

  5. Maybe he chose Evansville because things are so backwards here that he can be a hero without breaking a sweat. After all a town the size of Chandler tries harder and spends more.

    For a real seasoned professional Evansville isn’t any more of a challenge than making the basketball team at Plaza Park Middle School would be for LeBron James. We really are that far behind and the “deer in the headlights” council proves it.

    He has already manufactured excuses to fail such as “your budget is nothing” and “you have no hotel”. This fox has already outfoxed the Evansville chickens. He will either be a hero in three years or will retire telling us that we are so dumb and cheap that we are incapable of success. Unfortunately he is correct.

  6. The Biggest Asset this Community can build on is It’s Educational Opportunities. A Excellent Education is an achievable goal, and the enrollments at the Institutions for Higher learning, show, that Goal is alive and well in Our Community. What comes First, the Chicken or the Egg? The size of the Student bodies at USI, UE, Ivy Tech, are as big/or bigger than many small communities in the Tri-state, I see their enrollments continuing to Grow as Job skills for the 21stCentury are pursued. Some Grads will go, others will stay, and others will return. School is the Garden, the Students the seeds, that will bloom thru out the world.
    Evansville, in reality has more impact than any of us could imagine.

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