McGladrey Study Documents for CCO Readers to Judge for Themselves
Councilman Friend Pays Small Fine: Two of Three Charges Dropped
The City County Observer was in the house today in Marshall County, Kentucky when Evansville City Councilman and the Chairman of the Financed Committee faced authorities for three charges made against him by local water enforcement.
Two of the charges were dropped by the judge and Councilman Friend was fined $150 for the infraction of driving a boat under the influence of alcohol.
When asked about why Councilman Friend was jailed the Assistant Marshall County Attorney, Jason F. Darnall told the CCO  that  “jailing is optional and the arresting officers made that call themselves”. He made no further elaboration about the incident.
VANDERBURGH COUNTY FELONY CHARGES
Below is a list of felony cases that were filed by the Vanderburgh County Prosecutor’s Office on Friday, July 19, 2013.
Lauro Quiazon Theft-Class D Felony
Alan Vanwinkle Dealing in Methamphetamine-Class A Felony
Maintaining a Common Nuisance-Class D Felony
Criminal Recklessness-Class B Misdemeanor
Thomas Boswell Dealing in Methamphetamine-Class A Felony
Maintaining a Common Nuisance-Class D Felony
Criminal Recklessness-Class B Misdemeanor
Johnny Forest Jr Operating a Motor Vehicle after Forfeiture of License for Life-
Class C Felony
Resisting Law Enforcement-Class A Misdemeanor
For further information on the cases listed above, or any pending case, please contact Kyle Phernetton at 812.435.5688 or via e-mail at KPhernetton@vanderburghgov.org
Under Indiana law, all criminal defendants are considered to be innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.
What Can Other Governments Learn from Detroit’s Failure
Detroit’s fall into bankruptcy is being pitched as a cautionary tale for governments at every level. And while there are extraordinary circumstances unique to the Motor City, there are general lessons in what’s happened here that could benefit others.
Foremost is that debt does matter. Detroit borrowed against both its structural assets and its anticipated future revenues to sustain a budget that was hopelessly out of balance. Even over the past year, when it was obvious it could never conquer its mountain of debt, they city spent more than $80 million of borrowed funds to maintain operations.
Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr is fond of noting that even if Detroit committed every discretionary dollar for the next 50 years, it wouldn’t be enough to pay off the $18 billion it owes. Servicing that debt consumes 25 percent or more of the general fund, an amount projected to grow to 70 percent in five years if left unchecked. At the federal level, no one even talks about paying off the $17 trillion national debt. The ostensible goal is to reach a point where we’re no longer adding to it. The prevailing view has been that as long as the country can meet the debt payments, the size of the debt doesn’t matter.
But last year, the government spent nearly $360 billion on debt service, roughly 10 percent of the budget. If interest rates rise — and they will — and borrowing continues — and it will — that percentage could easily double. And just like in Detroit, money that should be spent on services to taxpayers will have to be diverted to debt service. Detroit’s experience also teaches the value of confronting problems early instead of deferring them to the crisis point. Detroit has known for at least 25 years that it was headed toward a meltdown of its pension system.
An increasing number of pensioners and a decreasing number of active workers made it inevitable that the funds would be at risk. But instead of adjusting benefits and increasing payments into the system, the city kept borrowing money from the funds and refused to make rational benefits reforms. As long as Detroit could write its pension checks each month, it ignored the looming disaster.
Sounds a lot like Social Security and Medicare, doesn’t it?
Detroit also lost focus on its core mission, which should have been providing essential services to its residents. The city saw itself as a jobs provider, bloating its payroll and providing services in-house that could have been easily outsourced. It allowed the services residents deem most important — public safety, education, transportation — to deteriorate. And so residents left for other places where they could get those services. They took their tax dollars with them, compounding the city’s fiscal troubles.
A government that focuses on serving its taxpayers first is less likely to lose its tax base. Detroit learned that the hard way. The key lessons Detroit’s situation can teach other governments is to borrow with extreme care and don’t make promises you can’t keep.
Source: RCP
Statism is turning America into Detroit – Ayn Rand’s Starnesville come to life, by: Daniel Hannan
Statism is turning America into Detroit – Ayn Rand’s Starnesville come to life
By Daniel Hannan
You thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction?
Look at this description of Detroit from today’s Observer:
What isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.
Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:
A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.
Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.
They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.
“Can you tell me the way to the factory?†asked Rearden.
The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?†she asked.
Rearden pointed. “That one.â€
“It’s closed.â€
Now here’s the really extraordinary thing. When Ayn Rand published those words in 1957, Detroit was, on most measures, the city with the highest per capita GDP in the United States.
The real-life Starnesville, like the fictional one, decayed slowly, then collapsed quickly. I spent a couple of weeks in Detroit in 1991. The city was still functioning more or less normally, but the early signs of decomposition were visible. The man I was staying withn, a cousin of my British travelling companion, ran a bar and restaurant. He seemed to my teenage eyes to be the embodiment of the American dream: he had never been to college, but got on briskly and uncomplainingly with building a successful enterprise. Still, he was worried. He was, he told me, one of a shrinking number of taxpayers sustaining more and more dependents. Maybe now, he felt, was the time to sell up, while business was still good.
He wasn’t alone. The population of Motown has fallen from two million to 700,000, and once prosperous neighbourhoods have become derelict. Seventy six thousand homes have been abandoned; estate agents are unable to shift three-bedroom houses for a dollar.
The Observer, naturally, quotes a native complaining that ‘capitalism has failed us,’ but capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist administrations for half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too much, driving away business and becoming a tool of the government unions.
Of Detroit’s $11 billion debt, $9 billion is accounted for by public sector salaries and pensions. Under the mountain of accumulated obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is not providing services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to respond to a 911 call and two thirds of ambulances can’t be driven. This is a failure, not of the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is fighting to look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy application on grounds that ‘will lessen the pension benefits of public employees’.
Which brings us to the scariest thing of all. Detroit could all too easily be a forerunner for the rest of the United States. As Mark Steyn puts it in the National Review:
Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform†actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers†and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.
Oh dear. No wonder the president would rather talk about Trayvon Martin. If you want to see Obamanomics taken to its conclusion, look at Starnesville. And tremble.
IS IT TRUE July 22, 2013
IS IT TRUE July 22, 2013
IS IT TRUE that the IS IT TRUE column in the City County Observer will be coming to you from the island of Maui from today until August 5th?…there is a 5 hour time difference between Evansville and Maui is 5 hours so our readers can expect IIT to be published at about noon during that time period?
IS IT TRUE for the second time in less than a week, a high ranking employee of the local Emergency Management Agency has been asked to resign by Mayor Lloyd Winnecke?… Adam Groupe, who was appointed as interim director right after he fired longtime head Sherman Greer last week, was asked to resign this morning?…Winnecke then appointed two men to run the EMA on an interim basis?…Evansville Fire Department District Chief Cliff Weaver and Evansville Police Department Capt. Andy Chandler are the latest recipients to be caretakers for the job that Sherman Greer did for over 20 years?..the reasons given for the two forced resignations are allegations by the mayor’s office that EMA officials approved 1,100 hours of inappropriate overtime for an agency secretary and violated city bidding practices in the 2011 purchase of radio equipment?…Winnecke stated that an internal review of EMA showed preference given to specific vendors in bid processes?…no charges have been filed against either Greer or Groupe and none have been alleged?
IS T TRUE it was quite pleasing on Sunday to see the Evansville Courier and Press awaken from its 10 year coma regarding calling out the office of the Mayor of Evansville for making backroom deals in a non-transparent way?…the firing of Sherman Greer and the quiet approval of some plastic crosses made by some children are the straws that broke the camel’s back for the Courier?…there are of course dozens of other sneaky backroom deals that were orchestrated by former Mayor Weinzapfel and his successor but none of those things rose to the level of taking the CP out our cheerleader mode for the Mayor of Evansville?…the attempt to snatch the Homestead Tax Credit from the resident homeowners of Vanderburgh County in a classic backroom sneaky (SNEGAL) way resulted in nothing more than a couple of infomercial pieces after the CCO exposed it?…the subversion of the funding authority of the City Council by Mayor Winnecke in the Earthcare Energy debacle and the same sort of stunt by former Mayor Weinzapfel just before leaving office that saddled the people of Evansville with the Johnson Controls dilemma didn’t raise the Sunshine flags over at the CP?…the sneaky firing of Marilee Fowler and others, the idiotic purchase of the McCurdy parking lot, the capricious way in which tax abatements are handed out, and the ramrod awarding of three different hotel contracts to companies that never secured financing was never even questioned?…the CCO is pleased to see the entity that should be the biggest watchdog of the citizens interest in Evansville awaken and show its tooth?
IS IT TRUE the only real reason that local media exists is to keep local government honest and to inform the populace in a way that helps with decisions come election time?…the CP has not been doing that for a long time?…every mayor has a person called the press secretary (cheerleader) to dispense sunshine and lollipops in attempts to propagandize to the huddled masses and secure power for their party in perpetuity?…that method has worked well for 50 years in Evansville and much of that been aided and abetted by a local media that has served as a willing propaganda distribution outlet for whomever happened to be mayor?…we encourage the CP to keep its guard dog of sunshine and sanity awake this time?…if every media outlet in Evansville would have scrutinized the offices of the mayor for the last 50 years the way the CCO has for the last 4 years Evansville may not be a candidate for a Detroit inspired future as it is today?
New Location for Deaconess Urgent Care
Deaconess Urgent Care Northbrook in Evansville will move to a new facility beginning Saturday, July 20th. Please visit us in our new location at 4506 North First Avenue (in the North Park Shopping Center), for your urgent care needs.
Beginning Saturday, July 20th, Deaconess Urgent Care Northbrook will relocate to 4506 North First Avenue in the North Park Shopping Center. Available services and hours of operation will remain the same.
Dan Alsip, Manager of Deaconess Urgent Care said “We are excited to relocate the Deaconess Urgent Care Center into the North Park Shopping Center. The change in location will provide our patients with new exam and procedure rooms as well as an expanded lobby area. The physical design of the space will also help our staff be more efficient in the delivery of urgent care.â€
Deaconess Urgent Care Centers offer patients access to health care when their primary care physician is unable to see them. This may occur after normal office hours, on weekends and holidays, or during regular office hours when the physician has a full schedule. Deaconess Urgent Care Centers offer lab and x-ray services, and treat minor injuries such as sprains, strains, and lacerations. Urgent Care is a lower-cost alternative to the hospital emergency room for treatment of minor injuries and illness.
St. Mary’s Dental Care for Kids – Dental Education and Prevention
Community Dental Care
St. Mary’s Dental Care for Kids provides dental education and prevention services for children who might not otherwise receive dental care. The Mobile Dental Clinic’s unique mobile care capability, combined with its focus on quality treatment, makes our program an innovative leader in care.
Our services include:
- A fully functioning dental office with ten dentists and six dental hygienists.
- Taking dental care to the patients by parking on-site at local schools and agencies.
- Assisting patients without insurance to sign up for Medicaid (Hoosier Healthwise) insurance.
- Providing a payment plan for those who cannot afford to pay up front.
- Providing free dental education and Spanish interpretation within the community.
- Collaboration with many local agencies to avoid duplication of services.
We also provide dental education, which is available upon request. For curriculum and scheduling information, please call the Community Outreach office at (812) 485-5843.