Dear Editor-

I’d like to give you an update on the McCurdy. While I would prefer to stay out of the media, there comes a time when you must speak up for yourself.

After waiting over a year for our HUD deal to get approved, we’ve instead decided to go in a different direction due to the increase in interest rates and cash required to close. Instead, we are pursuing a more traditional financing structure from a couple different lenders. We expect to have that approved here in 60 days. We have partnered with a firm out of Chicago to help facilitate the transaction.

As you saw on the news the other night, the city has squarely placed a target on our back. To put it bluntly, it’s political arm twisting at it’s worst and it is related to the IU Med School.

Two of our buildings were deemed “unsafe” today. This is very interesting timing since three weeks ago we rebuffed the city’s request for us to give them an option on some of our downtown properties for the Med School site they prefer. We said we would like to respond to an RFP as a developer and their realtor said they already have a preferred developer in mind. He stated they will not support us on this project. The mayor corroborated this to us a few days later.

We are also getting grief from Area Plan now over some marketing signs we have throughout the city, and some fence heights for some storage yards. Metropolitan Development and the City Attorney are piling on as well. From our perspective, it is an all out assault on us to willfully give up our property that we’ve been investing in for 10 years downtown.

We are a locally owned family business. Ben and I are products of the EVSC school system and Ball St and Indiana University, respectively. We chose to come back home and try to make a difference in this town. We paid our way through school and started this business quite humbly with a couple of computers and some fresh ideas. We now employ over 100 people and own almost 3 million sq ft of real estate in town. We’ve taken risks and invested our own dollars into areas of the city that were long forgotten.

Entrepreneurship is not always easy. We do not claim to be perfect…far from it. Managing growth has been a challenge at times, but we truly feel the community (and the people that work for us) are better off because of the work we’ve done.

We choose to go home to our families and do not socialize with the select few that have held this city back for decades at the country club. The CCO has spoken extensively on the brain drain and inability to recruit and keep young talent in Evansville. The mayor campaigned on cutting red tape and being
business friendly. Are we not exactly who they should be supporting?

We completely understand the “McCurdy fatigue” the community feels. We absolutely agree. Keep in mind we were not owners of the property until about a year ago. It has taken longer to come to fruition than we have hoped, but we have refurbished 5 vacant structures downtown so I would hope our track record would mean something. The JC Penney building was full or pigeons and peeling paint and sat vacant for 25 years. Dejongs had 6 feet of water in the basement.

Welborn Hospital sat vacant for 7 years, and on and on…These refurbished
properties have dramatically increased the tax base downtown and improved the
overall cityscape.

To be clear, we will take the necessary steps to correct any issues with our property. These issues are by no means major and could have been corrected through an informal phone call (as they have in the past), but the City evidently wanted to put on a show by holding a public meeting and inviting the media. Believe me- No one wants to see the McCurdy succeed more than The Kunkel Group. Owning a vacant building does us no good. With a little more patience, it can and will happen.

All the best,

Adam Kunkel
Vice President
The Kunkel Group

Excerpts

“One consequence of the botched launch of Obamacare is that it has, judging from his plummeting numbers with “millennials,” diminished Barack Obama’s cool. It’s not merely that the website isn’t state-of-the-art, but that the art it’s flailing to be state of is that of the mid-20th century social program. The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he’s just another Commissar Squaresville. So, health care being an irredeemable downer for the foreseeable future, this week the president pivoted (as they say) to “economic inequality,” which will be, he assures us, his principal focus for the rest of his term. And what’s his big idea for this new priority?”

“Drones! If there’s one thing Obama can do, it’s drones. He’s renowned across Yemen and Waziristan as the Domino’s of drones. If he’d thought to have your health insurance cancellation notices dropped by drone, Obamacare might have been a viable business model. Yet, even in Obama’s sole area of expertise and dominant market share, the private sector (Amazon) is already outpacing him.”

“Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow – Bezos (Amazon CEO) or Obama? Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles – what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job.”

“Once upon a time, millions of Americans worked on farms. Then, as agriculture declined, they moved into the factories. When manufacturing was outsourced, they settled into low-paying service jobs or better-paying cubicle jobs – so-called ‘professional services’ often deriving from the ever-swelling accounting and legal administration that now attends almost any activity in America. What comes next?
“Or, more to the point, what if there is no ‘next’?”

“What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, “capital” no longer needs “labor”? America’s liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downtown Abbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor.”

“So what jobs will Americans get to do? We dignify the new age as “the knowledge economy,” although, to the casual observer, it doesn’t seem to require a lot of knowledge. One of the advantages of Obamacare, according to Nancy Pelosi, is that it will liberate the citizenry: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.” It’s certainly true that employer-based health coverage distorts the job market, but what’s more likely in a world without work? A new golden age of American sculpture and opera? Or millions more people who live vicariously through celebrity gossip and electronic diversions? One of the differences between government health care in America compared to, say, Sweden is the costs of obesity, heart disease, childhood diabetes, etc. In an ever-more sedentary society where fewer and fewer have to get up to go to work in the morning, is it likely that those trends will diminish or increase?”

“Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry’s, Howard Dean … . And yet the Green Mountain State has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well – St. Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto “Very Vermont,” the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you’d think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers’ market. In Vermont, there’s no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there’s no disadvantaged minorities, because there’s only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there’s no nothing. Which is the real problem.”

“Large numbers of Vermonters have adopted the dysfunctions of the urban underclass for no reason more compelling than that there’s not much else to do. Once upon a time, St. Johnsbury made Fairbanks scales, but now a still-handsome town is, as Norman puts it, “hollowed out by the loss of work and purpose.” Their grandparents got up at four in the morning to work the farm, and their great-great-great-whatever-parents slogged up the Connecticut River, cleared the land, and built homes and towns and a civilization in the wilderness. And now? A couple of months back, I sat in the café in St. Johnsbury and overheard a state official and a chamber of commerce official discuss enthusiastically how the town could access some federal funds to convert an abandoned building into welfare housing.”

“Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors – even more to the lives of janitors – as it does to the lives of CEOs.” Self-reliance – “work” – is intimately connected to human dignity – “purpose.”

“So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps. The assumption is that mass, multigenerational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever-smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be either a member of the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neofeudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.”

“One wouldn’t expect the governing class to be as farsighted as visionaries like Bezos. But it’s hard to be visionary if you’re pointing in the wrong direction. Which is why the signature achievement of Obama’s “hope and change” combines 1940s British public health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems. But don’t worry: Maybe one day soon, your needle-exchange clinic will be able to deliver by drone. Look out below.”