These are the additional properties yet to purchase, which also wasn't reported until last Tuesday's Council meeting.
I hear there were contracts from December that expired, and now the properties will cost even more.
Walker Sanders, by not having all the agreements in place, may well have cost the city quite a bit more money.
Clearly deceptive tactics on the part of the task force, city council and City of Greensboro staff.
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Bait and Switch
First, taxpayers were "baited" by being told the City of Greensboro was buying $7.6 million of real estate for a $60 million GPAC, with announcements of two new hotels during Wyndham week when negative news is relatively prohibited by local main stream media.
Second, on the eve of the council vote, the discovery of more properties to purchase becomes known, on top of what was on the agenda.
The goal of the bait-and-switch in this case was to persuade the public to favor the switch as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the performing arts center and hotels, and for the city to spend more money without the public really knowing what was actually happening.
This suggests that city staff, city council and the News & Record Editorial Board didn't want to transparently inform, but instead bait the public with the wonderfulness of the project without disclosing important details like the bogus financing math presented.
No binding commitments and no letter of Credit
Kathy Manning, Randall Kaplan's wife, lobbying for a GPAC and their new hotel
City Council voted to finance $10 million for GPAC based on a projection that every performance will sell out all 250 premium parking spaces to pay for the debt service.
Please provide the "binding commitments for a minimum of $20,000,000.00 in private contributions for the GPAC.
Instead of using 149 events to calculate the income to pay off the bonds that the hired consultant predicted, city staff and council raised the number of events to 180 per year, with all 250 premium parking spaces sold out at each and every show, even though there will be plenty of free and much lower cost parking options in close proximity to the venue.
This is flat out bogus math, which means the City Council members who voted for it broke their fiduciary duties to Greensboro's taxpayers.
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Bait-and-switch; like when I sold above ground aluminum swimming pools in 1992.
When I arrived in Greensboro, I was trained to present a bait and switch one call close sales presentation to sell swimming pools.
I got two leads a day, and would drive anywhere from Blacksburg, Virginia to Rock Hill, South Carolina to make sales calls.
Told the marks I was a "manager", on my way to set up a demonstration pool in the next town.
The bait was a $999 pool advertised in TV guides, and I would downplay the quality of the advertised pool, and switch to a $13,900 pool in the presentation, took a little off the top if they wanted the "demonstration" deal, under which they agreed to write a letter of recommendation etc..., reduced the big number to an affordable monthly payment of $249, (reduction to absurdity) and pop a second mortgage on the home at least a 17% annual interest rate.
I made half of any deal over $7,200.
I have been telling this story among others in Financial Ethics classes for years, as an example of how to not get ripped off by some of who I used to be.
The GPAC promotion and propaganda has been the same thing only different.
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Adam Smith, the father of modern economics wrote “The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.”
Greensboro's taxpayers are being played for fools.
3 comments:
What I wrote;
"I hear there were contracts from December that expired, and now the properties will cost even more."
I am talking about a different set of contracts that expired.
From a recent censored info request;
"please provide copies of all expired and current contracts for GPAC properties to be purchased by the city of Greensboro, including purchase prices, closing costs and any other relevant documentation."
Well, have the contracts expired or not? And why did the News & Record not list the other two properties in their breathless reporting of the other deals?
Also, is it just me, or is it odd that the city voted to buy the other seven properties but let CFGG do the negotiating? CFGG might be the conduit for the line of credit (which will probably be Carolina Bank, but I honestly don't know at this time), but at the end of the day it's the city that's making the purchase.
Unless there's yet one more thing I don't understand about this whole deal.
George:
Believe you make a good point as well as attempt to be as accurate as possible given the non transparency of the aggregate situation.
An overarching point is that of the fourth category of spending of Milton Friedman : other people (politicos), spending other people’s money (taxpayer resources), on other people (recipient). The forth category of spending is the most inefficient category of spending. Hence the mechanics, process and actions of the inherent inefficiencies are what you are reporting upon.
James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock [public choice theory] expanded on the mechanics, process and actions of the inherent inefficiencies of politicos spending other people’s money. The politico attempts to depict such mechanics, process and actions as “the public interest” and/or “the public good” with the politico’s self interest supplanted by altruism. The politico desperately wants James and Jane Goodfellow to believe the politico’s actions are altruistic. That is pure political dupery and nitwitery as the politico is a self-interested breed.
Buchanan and Tullock as well as F.A. Hayek may well have influenced Friedman in 1981 when he wrote:
“The government has nothing to give. The government is simply a mechanism which has the power to take from some to give to others. It is a way in which some people can spend other peoples' money for the benefit of a third party - and not so incidentally themselves".
- The Invisible Hand in Economics and Politics, Milton Friedman, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981, p11.
Thomas Sowell may well have expressed the situation succinctly:
‘Economic “planning” is one of many politically misleading expressions. Every economic activity under every conceivable form of society has been planned. What differs are the decision making units that do the planning - which range from children saving their allowances to buy toys to multinational corporations exploring for oil to the central planning commission of a communist state. What is politically defined as economic “planning” is the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by government officials.’
- Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, 1996 edition, pgs. 213 and 214.
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