Open Letter to City Council on the Decision to Vet Hotel

Evansville, September 10, 2013:

The following is an open letter to the City Council from an Administrator of the Facebook protest page, Citizens of Evansville against a Taxpayer Funded Hotel.

Dear Esteemed City Council Members,

We are aware you just voted Monday to extend the vetting process and require more information of developer HCW. We are also aware that an Indiana company Crowe-Horwath was selected by an 8-1 margin to perform the additional vetting and produce a report.

While we applaud the efforts of Councilman John Friend in requesting this additional information, and while we appreciate the deliberative efforts of the eight City Council members who voted for the vetting to continue, we feel there is already plenty of information contained within the Hunden Report and within the proposal itself to warrant a vote of “no”.

It is our belief that even if all requested paperwork is in perfect order and it turns out HCW’s history is spotless, the council will still ultimately be faced with the same decision with which they started – whether or not to GIFT $37.5 million to a private, out-of-state developer to build a hotel that is twice the size the market will bear.

Placing too much emphasis on additional vetting, we feel, is a red herring that distracts from existing facts. If the ethics of this deal alone aren’t enough upon which to base a decision, then surely the findings of the $105,000 Hunden Study are enough. It is our hope when all this vetting is complete that the Council will return a vote of “no”, regardless of the Crowe-Horwath findings.

Sincerely,
Brad Linzy
https://www.facebook.com/EvansvilleSaysNo

Janitors play an important role. You’d never think of hiring one without interviewing the applicants face-to-face. At the very least you would do your best to determine who’d be most likely to be an asset instead of a liability; who would show up on time, and not be an embarrassment to your firm. If you’re smart, you’ll interview as many janitorial candidates as possible, and gather as much information as possible before making your choice. Should hiring a congressman be so much less rigorous than our process for hiring janitors, or cashiers, or…anything else? This is no joke. We The People are in terrible trouble in no small part because we make life and death choices with terrible, shallow, irrelevant and even false information. We hire by labels, slogans, words written by people who aren’t even applying for the job, with money from you-know-very-well-where. I am applying for the job of Indiana’s 8th US Congressional district Representative. This job is important enough that there should be serious, in-depth and in-person job interviews with tough questions and non-scripted answers. Voters should see what their options really are; not just the crafted “message” and marketing that tainted money buys. I propose at least one public forum in each of CD 8’s 18+ counties; and I propose the format of the forums be designed to discourage canned speeches and maximize public interaction. And of course I propose that these forums include all candidates who will be on the ballot in 2014. I applaud the League of Women Voters for the televised debates they’ve sponsored for this district, and of course hope for another televised debate. But voters need all the information they can get; and they should have no excuses for not getting it. It is important; now more than ever.

As anticipated the Evansville City Council voted tonight by an 8 – 1 majority to hire the firm of Crowe-Horwath to VET the hotel development agreement that was previously approved by the Evansville Redevelopment Commission and touted by the Winnecke Administration as good to go.

The lone dissenting vote came from Councilman Jonathan Weaver who just last week called for a vote of approval prior to going forward with a Vetting contract.

No time frame was given for the completion of the vetting and no date was set to vote on the agreement. Councilman John Friend stated that some of the information needed to vet the agreement and the developer has not been supplied yet. The next scheduled meeting of the City Council is September 23.