LETTER TO EDITOR: Mayor Muddies The Water On City Finances

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In a move that demonstrated the sheer PR genius of the Winnecke administration, the Mayor’s treatise of excuses for the city’s financial trauma appeared on-line and in the “Dead Tree” edition of the daily publication over the weekend.

His theme was penned because he is pleading to move $8 million around between the Rainy Day Fund, Riverboat Revenue Fund and General Fund. City council is scheduled to review his request Monday night.  Apparently, he still doesn’t get the meaning of “Rainy Day Fund” or he thinks it has been raining a lot during his time on the third floor of the Civic Center.

He wanted to explain this little monetary difficulty to us, use his magic decoder ring, lest we lowly taxpayers get the impression that he just can’t figure out that “budget” means you are given a figure and you spend no more. He also didn’t want his financial maneuver to get tangled up in politics, he wrote. That train left the station a long time ago with Winnecke sitting in the engineer’s seat.

With all the military precision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he reviewed his litany of excuses for his government’s failure to keep the city on sound financial footing. The bugaboos, according to the Mayor, are: Less tax revenue, an inconvenient revenue distribution schedule, rising health care costs, and finally, property tax caps.

Now, if he keeps harping about property tax caps long enough, he’s going to talk himself into quite a pickle. These state-required limits keep public officials/politicians from digging too deep into our pockets to fund government. This is a curious mantra for Winnecke, since it’s the final firewall between Evansville property owners and his grab for money.  Aren’t Republicans generally fiscally conservative?

He concluded his theme paper with the familiar indictment of the Democrat-controlled City Council for an ordinance they passed earlier this year that stopped him from finessing the fund balances by smoothly maneuvering money back and forth, and around and around. It was hard to determine if the administration wasn’t counting the same dollar more than once, so seamless were the money movements.

What he failed to mention was that prior to passing the ordinance,  the City Council made repeated requests for a “spending plan,” as they predicted the city’s financial ship could run aground. The  past Mayor of Evansville and City Controller said a plan would be forthcoming.  But another operative sneered, “We’re making a plan. It’s called a budget.”

So, with no “plan,” the ordinance halting the fund interchange was passed, and the moaning began.

The City Council, not without their failings, has become the Mayor’s favorite foil. In order to be the “good guy” he has to identify the “bad guys.”  They have often failed to fully examine issues in a timely and concerted manner.  Often, they are all over the place – challenging, arguing and finally acquiescing.  Leadership sometime seems to be simply a goal.

But, the negative fiscal prognostications came from council, though sometimes hard to decipher.  The Mayor and his squad had a simple retort – “No it’s not.”  However, beginning year General Fund balances were reported to have dropped from $4 million in 2013 to $307,000 in 2015.

You almost have to overlook some of Winnecke’s emotionally charged positioning.  After all, he came into office believing that Democrats loved him.  He somehow thought that election love, borne out of a local political divide of epic proportions, would continue as a warm afterglow into his reign.  The concept that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” escaped him somehow, so he didn’t see that election love is a convenient, fleeting love.

Thus he started down the path to a dicey relationship with Democrats on City Council.  He didn’t understand that he needed their approval for critical issues and other lesser whims. Cart then horse, was his frequent game plan.

When he stood before that “Welcome to Evansville Earthcare Energy” banner on March 2, 2012, he didn’t make much of the fact that the City Council still had to OK the deal. With some hesitation that finally got legs, the council did get its turn to welcome Earthcare Energy to Evansville, but they chose to jerk back the welcome mat, thankfully so.  During this drama, the Mayor unveiled a strategy of casting council as obstinate, naysaying obstructionists.  Ah, where did the love go?

Winnecke spent the rest of his first year in office waging a campaign to become the first monarch of a consolidated county-wide government.  That didn’t turn out so well either. They love me, they love me not.

And finally, to explain his leadership posture and motivation, we have to remember he came from county government, a virtual Republican love fest for years.  Not an environment requiring a high level of compromise.  So power-sharing might have been a somewhat foreign concept for him, a love-struck new Mayor faced with figuring out how to work with checks-and-balances and having an apparent need to perfect his financial expertise.

 

Name Held By Request

Evansville

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19 COMMENTS

  1. Excellent letter.

    Riverboat Funds: isn’t the wording of that 1995 ordinance, that the money only be used for capital expenditures, sufficient to thwart this $$$ grab–as it would surely be used for operations once it is inside the General Fund ?

    Rainy Day Fund: is that fund a purely subjective decision as to when it’s “raining” ?

    City Council: fiscal discipline is like being on a diet: you have to have a plan, and stick to it. Be strong.

  2. Now, since Santa Lloyd is running out of christmas toys so its time to go to the well. His complaints about the property tax caps is very clear . . the first chance he very gets our taxes will be going up and up and up. According to the state board of accounts published reports, the last time this city had more income vs expenses in the General Fund was under Weinzapfel. No doubt this most of us are surprised.

  3. Well there you have it, preceded by the worst Mayor EVER, Weinzapful, We now are enduring the Most Incompetent Mayor EVER Wennecke.
    There is No Money left in the till after these two “winners”!
    Hopefully we will see a improvement with the election of Riecken as Mayor,the proof will be in the pudding of course, but at this juncture there is not any space left at the bottom, and all that’s left is to go up, a involved city council would help. TIme for Mosbey&Weaver to join Wennecke in defeat this November as well!

  4. It is entirely possible, even probable, that the water & sewer account which the SBOA cited in the city’s financial compliance audits for years because the city refused to separate it from the city’s general fund as required by GAAP was the go to fund for shortfalls needing coverage from any of the city’s other operations.

    It would go a long way in explaining why the water & sewer utility was not, for decades, maintained in a fashion that would have met with EPA approval. The money coming into that account from monthly user fees was just too tempting, and it could be moved around without the general public’s knowledge.

    Now that the separation of the accounts has taken place, and the administration must inform the common council when they fall short in one account and wish to borrow from another, we are seeing what we should have been seeing decades ago.

    The saddest and most disgraceful part of it is that those user fees that were collected over those many years and should have been used to keep the water & sewer utility in a state of the art fashion were transferred to other accounts for any variety of reasons. I would maintain that it is obvious when one views the condition of the water & sewer capital plant over those past years, and right up to the current time, that not all of those “borrowed” funds made their way back into the water & sewer account. Because of those transgressions, current customers of the water & sewer utility can look forward to higher rates every 6 months into the future, until the utility reaches compliance with the EPA mandate.

    The whole history of this calamity, going back decades, speaks to weak leadership in the mayors office and by the members of the common council. It is difficult to imagine that over all those years no one ever stepped up to the plate and took ownership of the problem and informed the public of what was going on.

    • You are absolutely right. I do not like paying more, but I realize this has to be fixed. They are already billing utility customers for compliance that they have not agreed too. I would like some assurance that this money will be used to fix the sewer problem. It looks like the city has first dibs on utility income to pay city bills. I also am not clear on the repayment of these “loans” Does someone sign a note as to when it is to be repaid? Is it interest free?

      • They are BONDS that must be re payed with interest within the time frame described, although when money gets tight they will sometimes do a refunding of the bond issue to lower the annual out premium by extending the repayment period, which of course costs the ratepayers even more money.

        The bond attorneys make money off of the process as do the underwriters, and the banks handling the funds.

  6. According to the published reports as of December 31, 2014, there are 510 cities in Indiana that operate more efficiently than Evansville and only 39 worst that Evansville. As such, we have 550 cities reporting their expenditures compared to the number of people living in their communities to operate their cities and towns and out of those our city rates in the 8th percentile. ( 550/40) = 8% . . . WITHOUT ANY DOUBT THE WINNECKE ADMINISTRATION IS EITHER ENPTED OR DIABOLICAL. RATHER ELIMINATE THE CAP ON WHAT HE COULD TAX YOU ON YOUR HOME AND DECLARES THE CITY IS TOO BIG TO MANAGE IS FINANCES!!!!!!

  7. Good letter. Tough to uproot an incumbent but Spendecke sure deserves our best effort. He cannot be believed or trusted.

    Evansville can no longer afford the underhanded machinations of the Lloyd Winnecke administration. A deracination is in order this November. Send our pitiful little accidental mayor packing back to the private sector. Maybe a chancellorship at one of our institutions of higher learning is in order. Robe him up, he’s born to it. With his stellar communication skills and a mind nimbled by endless money-juggling schemes, he’d be a natural. Evansville’s Theatre Drive Campus of Harrison College might be a good spot to install him. If it doesn’t work out he can be a preacher, patient, monk, choirboy, all-around Zenster, stay-at-home schemer or Afghani warlord. (Assuming he hasn’t hocked the city-funded robe he was awarded upon his discharge from public duty).

    ☆ Gail Riecken for Mayor ☆

  8. This separation of funds ordinary is making it very dicey to continue their ponzi scheme and maybe this is why Friend has had a BIG RED TARGET on his back. Next year if Santa is re-elected and dumb and bumber joins the idiot brigade, i.e. the city council, a/k/a/ Mosby/Weaver team my bet is this will be the first ordinance repealed. So, please keep your arms and legs inside this moving vehicle and by all means please belt-up. BTW, keep an eye on your wallet . . .

  10. I think they’ve probably already got 4 solid votes to amend or repeal the transparency ordinance, G-2015-14.
    Butterfly McGinn, Adams and the hapless twins. Adams hasn’t really said how he stands but that’s the way he likes it. However, you can only give someone the benefit of the doubt for so long. We tried it with Winnecke, look where it got us.

    The council should simply say they spoke when they passed it and didn’t pass it so they could repeal it the first time Robespierre whined out.

    • Bandana, my crystal ball says there are also four HELL NO votes re: amend or repeal the transparency ordinance:

      Friend
      O’Daniel
      SBR
      MIA Fireman from West Side, Al Lindsey

      That makes Sweet, Sweet Connie the deciding vote . . . .

      • Sweet Sweet claims to be endorsing Gail Riecken. We will see. It shouldn’t be a partisan thing but is. You just can’t let something llike Llordie have free rein to juggle the public’s money. The slippage is uncountable and he’ll be half way to Tucson before the show ledger even surfaces.

        • Every effort will be made to shield mayor dress up an his play pretty friends from reality tonight.

          Millions of dollars of contracts and patronage jobs are at stake and his minions will be charging that we the people just don’t understand what progress is. Or else they will charge us with being haters and being “embarrassments to the city of EvansvillÆŽ”

  11. I think the C&P owes Mrs Riecken should demand equal space to rebut the mayors free political ad.

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