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.
