The Centerra Metro Districts have funded developer McWhinney projects’ landscaping, architectural finishes, Centerra monument signs and the Motorplex sign by determining they are “public Improvements.” As part of their agreement with the City of Loveland, McWhinney also promised to fund general transportation projects named “Regional Improvements” with the money raised through the Metro District bonds and taxes.
Instead, the McWhinneys have played a shell game with the money by changing the definition of “Regional Improvements” and regularly amending the Master Financing Agreement (MFA). In other words, in place of really funding the most critical Regional Transportation Improvements, which was the original intent of the agreement (MFA), McWhinney has simply negotiated changes to the definition of regional improvements in order to claim they are in compliance with the agreement.
Now $3 million of federal stimulus money will be spent to create roundabouts and make safety improvements to the rossroads/I-25 interchange. McWhinney is bringing before Loveland’s City Council another amendment to the MFA to continue their shell game by removing any language that forces them to fund the I-25/US 34 interchange before taking on more debt.
In secret meetings with each city councilor the decision to support their proposal was already made. Absent any significant public outcry, the City Council will approve the next in the series of MFA amendments to free the McWhinneys of any obligation to honor the original terms of the MFA.
Read the complete story and review all the important city documents at LovelandPolitics.com.
Last Monday I read in the local newspaper that McWhinney has to make a regional improvement for each $70 million of bond money they spend.
I read very carefully through the MFA copy you linked to your story and found no such provision. Instead, I found a formula that says they cannot borrow more than 70% of their previous debt of which 30% etc…etc…
Has anyone contacted the reporter to at least let her know she is reporting false information? I don’t say this to be down on them but more as a citizen who is concerned the community is being fed McWhinney propaganda and not real facts through the Reporter-Herald. It is an important factual error (not subjective) and anyone who compares her story to the real document can see this is the case.
HI EVERYONE! WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO OUCH-ROUSEY? EITHER HE IS TAKING THE WORLD’S LONGEST SMOKE BREAK OR IS TOO EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT HE WAS DEAD FLAT WRONG ON GRAND STATION AND IS ASHAMED TO SHOW HIMSELF HERE AGAIN.
ANYWHO, GOOD JOB ON THIS ONE. WHERE IS THE LOCAL MEDIA? SLEEPING OR SMOKING SOMETHING MORE THAN ROUSEY’S CIGARETTES?
IT IS TOO INCREDIBLE TO BELIEVE SOMETIMES JUST HOW MUCH CONTROL MCWHINNEY HAS OF CITY HALL AND THE DISTORTER-HERALD!
One point you failed to make is that McWhinney has many little Limited Liability Companies. When they are short on cash it doesn’t mean the actual McWhinney brothers are also short on cash.
Just like AIG executives they want to socialize their losses but privatize their gains. The fact this community continues to go into debt for these two rich Southern California brothers really bothers me. Isn’t there anyone in city hall with integrity or a brain?
Please don’t leave the impression they are broke. They have more money than they know what to do with and can easily fund the light industrial area or the crossroads roundabouts with their own profits. But since that stuff is expensive why not use public debt or stimulus money?
All we did was trade paying for their little trolley into subsidizing many other bad ideas like their crappy zero-scape, autoplex and now a the district 5 industrial center. There is a reason they need to come to the city for money – private lenders wouldn’t touch Grand Station. High density between a railroad and highway where land is cheap? Common!
I am tired of seeing this city go further into the debt hole for these two brats from Southern California. Neither live in the community and neither gives a rat’s ass about Loveland. Also, you are wrong on the advances they gave the district. Ask anyone who works there and they will tell you McWhinney is billing the Metro District – which it doesn’t pay and later calls that an “advance.”
This is how they are sucking cash our of the Metro District to pay their expenses. All they need to do is mark-up their “advances” and pull out more than what they gave. It is a big cash cow for them that Lovelanders are going to be paying for years to come.
It’s bait & switch tactics on such a grand scale that this little town’s council couldn’t concieve of it. Now that it’s been done to them over and over for years, they’d rather be willfully blind than cop to the truth that they’ve been played for suckers!!
Voters need to remind city hall who’s in charge. Or are we in charge anymore? Are we just surfs to the Lord McWhinney now?
Anyone remember Grand Station? Remember when McWhinney said on CBS News in Denver
“Chad McWhinney said the development will also have extras like a Las Vegas-style water fountain and a double-decker trolley car.”
Too bad he intended for the rest of us to pay for his big dreams that his little crew of leasing agents couldn’t sell to anyone except Loveland businesses whose patrons were already paying taxes here.
Everyone in the car business in town knew he was recruiting Davidson Chevrolet for years and knew that his auto mall would devastate the 287 corridor through town and all the dealerships. An industry paper even has an interview where he admits thinking of his auto mall when traveling between dealers to buy a car for his Mother-In-Law in the mid-1990’s.
Well, he finally won over the Loveland dealerships but lost the Mother-In-Law in a divorce. A real win, win!
For Loveland it was a lose, lose. Those dealerships were paying all their sales and property taxes to the city before they moved to the Metro District where now the sales tax is shared between McWhinney and the city and McWhinney gets all the extra property tax (TIF).
Chad McWhinney also bragged about flying the dealership owners around in a helicopter to show them Northern Colorado from the air. I wonder if the helicopter costs were also paid by his taxpayer funded Metro District.
Wow. Great story. Again, this would be shocking if I didn’t already have the sense that they’ve been leading this Manager and Mayor (and cronies) by the nose. Hopefully, your shining a little sunlight on those things that the City would rather keep secret will lead at least to some informed citizens. I can’t thank you enough for letting me know about some of these shenanigans, no matter how angry it makes me.
If you people are even half right about this information, well, it’s just disgusting. I’d almost rather not know what ninnies and suck ups my town hires and retains as our “leaders”. Disgusting! That McWhinny fellow is trash, but at least he’s smart trash. It’s the “city fathers” that ought to be taken to task.
Well I opened my Sunday paper today and read an interesting story! Exactly what you guys reported back on March 25 about I25/US34 improvement will not be built so McWhinney can get those tax dollars.
It takes a lot of chutpzah for Chad McWhinney to continue milking the Metro District of our tax dollars to subsidize his failing business. And it takes a lot of ignorance or corruption for those people on council to allow him to continue doing it.
Anyone remember the $80 million Council approved for McWhinney’s hotel parking garage at Grand Station? Well, he tried to lure Hammond and Embassy Suites with it and failed. Now, Loveland has the new Embassy Suites where ALL the taxes go to the City of Loveland instead of 42% going to Chad McWhinney’s slush fund (you guys call it a Metro District).
Jay Hardy’s comments in the paper are laughable. They never “lent” $7 million to the Metro District. They billed it for work “already performed” for the district.
McWhinney is stealing our taxes while failing to build anything of value for this community as promised. How come everyone is so calm about it? Is Loveland nothing but a community of lemmings?
Are we waiting until Loveland is completely broke? Anyone hear that large sucking sound?
They are starting to cut services to the community but continue giving McWhinney even more. I hope the next person injured on the I-25 and US34 sues Loveland and the McWhinneys.
Taking out over $80 million of public debt while promising to fix that intersection while diverting it instead to only improve properties owned by McWhinney is a crime in my mind if not an excellent civil action by an injured citizen.
Chad McWhinney is a welfare baby as far as I am concerned. Has he ever put his own inherited wealth at risk? Hammond built the Embassy Suites with money he earned the old fashioned way – he earned it. McWhinney is still trying to build a hotel with our money and the council doesn’t have the &%## to stop him.
Gene Peilin is a goofball and doesn’t have any clue about what he is doing. At least half the loveland city council needs to be shown a rocking chair and be given a warm glass of milk. We need real professionals and not a bunch of boss hogs on city council.
I don’t know about “DN but I don’t read The Repeater-Hairball. I don’t do business with The Reporter-Distorter, and I don’t encourage anyone to do so. As to Loveland being a bunch of lemmings – no one I know marches lockstep to the lies and fraud passed off as professional journalism in the pages of the aforementioned fourth-rate rag I wouldn’t wipe my dog’s arse with.
Which is why, according to well-placed sources, said newspaper is circulating the financial drain. Apparently Ed Lehman runs his finances much like the McWhinneys and his plans for a grand facility in Berthoud are grinding to a halt because they are over budget and behind schedule, and the bank holding his growing debt is getting understandably nervous.
People who live and work in Loveland know Lehman and the McWhinneys to be who and what they are, and give them no consideration.
Neither should you, “DN”.
Thank you for reporting this story. It is really hard for me to believe just how corrupt our city council is.
What hasn’t been adequately noted is that McWhinney wants to release the $12 Mill set aside for US 34/I25 for “other purposes” – which includes paying themselves apparently above-market interest on the “loans” they made to the Metro District. What a clever con-game they’re running!
I am wondering if I was the only person watching the meeting last night?
Chad McWhinney’s argument was insulting. Just like Grand Station, he wants taxpayers to subsidize his development.
By tempting the council by saying a large manufacturing firm might want to rent from him if he uses the $12 million (already taken from public debt) to improve his own properties is insulting. This is why Metro Districts are so dangerous. Expecting a public good to be paid when the public’s money is controlled by private hands is absurd.
One project has nothing to do with the other. Loveland cannot grow until that intersection is fixed. McWhinney is making Loveland into a 3rd world city by improving only his properties with the money while letting the public infrastructure deteriorate.
Even if he could lease to a company that provides jobs it doesn’t help if everyone else with a job who needs to travel through the I-25/U.S. 34 interchange are now even more delayed getting to work.
Loveland taxpayer’s only now have 25 years to pay back the $120 million of public debt created by McWhinney. If we don’t get any public projects for it but instead improve only his personal and corporate properties than we are screwed.
McWhinney can sell (and has in the past) the land once our tax dollars go towards improving it and increasing the value. In other words, he has an exit strategy to take that value and cash-out. We will be stuck with the debt.
Loveland’s City Council needs to realize he is only using tax dollars to compete with surrounding developments. As with the Embassy Suites, the council gave him $80 million for a parking garage and he still couldn’t lure Emabassy Suites away from its current location where it is paying full taxes to our city. Had McWhinney succeeded, the city would have lost millions of dollars in future revenue Embassy Suites will now pay because it isn’t stuck in subsidized Centerra.
If a manufacturer places jobs just outside or inside Loveland the economics are the same. They will hire people from all over the general area. But if the money to improve the I-25/U.S. 34 interchange is instead used to help McWhinney improve another property and pay his internal lobby staff to draw that company to Centerra, we still don’t get all the tax revenue but the city does have to pay all the costs of services – police, fire, ambulance etc….
The question has nothing to do with jobs or regional transportation improvements. The question is regional transportation improvement or McWhinney’s pocket to compete again with adjacent property developers.
That choice should be easy!
Did I read correctly? Is McWhinney asking Loveland’s city council to let them spend money set aside to improve the highways at 34 & I25 for private purposes??? I’d really like to know that. My wife drives my kids over those roads all the time. That interchange is congested and getting more unsafe all the time. If McWhinney wants to build warehouses or light industrial space or anything else, let them spend their own money! This city has spent plenty on them already! As far as I can see, the “public benefits” of subsidizing the wealthy McWhinneys just keep getting pushed into the future, while costs to Loveland’s citizens to subsidize their empire grow.
Since The Reporter-Herald thinks the McWhinneys can do no wrong let Ed Lehman give the McWhinneys the fortune he made from deceit and dishonesty, and we can call it good.
I say again that those developers are just doing what they’re (well) paid to do. It’s the city council that should be looking out for the citzens. Obviously they aren’t, so I hope anyone who reads this will remember how their councilman votes on this when elections come around in November.
HONOR YOUR WORD, MCWHINNEY!!! CONSTRUCT AN INTERCHANGE WITH THE MONEY YOU TOOK FROM US FOR THAT PURPOSE!!!!!!!