The Loveland City Council off-site for today and tomorrow will consider the financial future of the city. The overall budget is being presented in three different scenarios; best, nominal and worst case.
Unfortunately, every scenario relies on revenue from Grand Station even though it wasn’t built which means every scenario contains long-term projections that are at the very least optimistic and hardly worst case. At the same time, the capital improvement budget fails to fund a fire station in East Loveland which will be required if Grand Station is really built someday. This is what some people call “having your cake and eating it too.”
Money available in the past two years for land speculation along the I-25, grease payments for annexation agreements to compete with Johnstown and other multi-million dollar unplanned spending have created a pinch in the finances of the city. City Manager Williams is telling council that if they want to support even the necessary utility improvements downtown they will need to raise property taxes across Loveland or cripple the Urban Renewal Authority with more debt. This should make for an interesting discussion.
What is conspicuously absent from the budget memos and discussion is the money borrowed from CEF’s (Capital Expansion Funds) for emergency fire protection and parks and recreation. Maybe this is because most residents would be shocked to learn that money was taken by council to fund the acquisition of speculative property ventures along I-25 from the CEF’s.
It appears that Williams intends to retire in 2009 as he has set the city on a collision course beginning in 2010. Deficit spending will range between $16 million to $50 million for the city by 2015 even if you believe growth in sales tax revenue will continue.
One solution being proposed by staff is the elimination of certain services for the residents of the community. Of course, limiting services to residents while increasing their taxes is a staff generated option. A meeting in late spring to identify those services the residents don’t need is being planned – stay tuned.
A number of the City Council members read this blog and would likely appreciate your thoughts on how to fix the city’s looming financial train wreck.
Not surprising that they would suggest that if people want a healthy downtown, they have to pay more (thru property taxes) to have it. Knowing that the residents would have to vote on such an increase, and that they are normally tax-resistant and that the economy is sour, they could then blame “the citizens” for any failure to “invest in” downtown.
Of course, they (this City Manager and Council) handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies to the McWhinneys for their private profits (the take from the Centerra URA deal was estimated between $590 and $700 million in local subsidies); and continued as recently as this year to pile on to those subsidies.
And the sad irony is that the City’s continual focus on I-25 development is precisely why downtown has languished…as it has been a continual message that “out there” is where people should invest.
As someone who is very familiar with this subject you need to mention the payments to pay back the CEF loans is strangling the discretionary funding for the city. It is the same as a person who doesn’t plan to buy a new car and borrows the money from their 401K to pay a short-term loan for the car. As you back that loan you don’t have money for other priorities, Therefore, the monies available for capital improvements for downtown from the general fund are no longer there as the payments for the CEF loans need to come out of the general fund’s discretionary monies.
“A number of the City Council members read this blog and would likely appreciate your thoughts. . .”
Considering you censor comments to advance a partisan political agenda why should any believe your claims that city council members even know about this poorly executed blog?
According to various site statistics this blog gets less than one hundred hits a week.
Hardly influential. Mostly lies and frauds.
I have read and contributed to this website for a very longtime.
1. I have read comments made by at least two members of the city council on this website and know of two others who read it.
2. The counter appears to climb at about 500 visits per day (when I counted) and hardly a week goes by somebody doesn’t mention to me something about this website
3. The information I find here is not available anywhere else. Plus I know they were really at the meeting because of all the pictures.
All in all, I like this site due to no advertising, it doesn’t cost anything to subscribe and I have never had a single posting censored.
My only complaint is they changed the blog format. The old format seems to get more use than this one so they should change it back to the older format.
Okay, the http://www.LovelandPolitics.com site has 13,322 hits in the last 5 months and the LovelandPolitics.com site has 8,632 hits in the last 5 months. That is what the counters show on the two homepages.
My math tells me together they are getting over 4,000 hits monthly. That is more than many sites I help to administer for businesses here in Loveland.
Dude, if you paid to join one of these phony “statistics secrets” and all that you got ripped-off big-time. They are scams. Only the server where the site is resident knows how many hits it got through all the different portals.
Each ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) on the web have different traffic stats but you can’t know which ones it goes through since it changes every second. Seriously, grow-up or get help.
I don’t agree with lots of crap they put on here but all in all I think it is the best news place in Loveland since I don’t subscribe to any newspaper. Not that I don’t like them just no time always worken 24/7.
Chow
Maybe the person is just fine but trying to prevent you from talking about the budget.
I didn’t go but Keith did go (Napoleon I think he is called here) and he is braver than me. They couldn’t even agree on the comment on whether or not they need to focus because Walt Skowron kept changing the topic.
Funny for you guys but a nightmare for professional city employees!!!
Does anyone remember the story, first seen here as I recall, in which the city manager was lobbying hard for a unique retiree benefits package that would pay lavish health benefits to former city officials? If I remember right, he hadn’t mentioned that he would soon retire, had he?
Oh, and gentlemen prefer scotch.
Page views are not the same as unique visitors. You can hit the counters on this site over and over because it is a page view meter, not a unique visitors meter.
And I bet the owners of this site made up the comments singing their praises just like they make up other stuff.
No wonder they get along with The Reporter-Herald. And if you want to be like that then make sure to plagiarize material from the Rants section of Craigs List and The Huffington Post just they like do.
For giggles why not make false statements against the Loveland Police Department like the professional journalists at The Reporter-Herald, and then deny responsibility as well when you face criminal charges?