The City made many poor decisions. They let the PRIVATELY owned baseball park off the hook for another $1.5 million adding to the approximately $5 million taxpayers paid to reconstruct the ballpark area when it was built. They wasted unknown millions of dollars on the riverfront and now need millions more to tear down what should have never been built and replace it with they don't know what. They spent millions of dollars on the corner of University and Main that in addition causes vehicular traffic backups and the time wasted by the drivers and passengers to accommodate a relatively small number of Bradley Students who couldn't wait for Stop and Go signals already in place. They let City roadbeds, curbs and sidewalks deteriorate to a point never experienced here in decades. The reconstruction of the Warehouse District cost taxpayers around $30 million to largely benefit the developers. Some of the businesses and residents that have moved there or are going to move there means more empty space where they are leaving.The taxpayer $ spent on the long empty Cub Food building will never be recovered because of it's size, location and many dozens of empty business buildings available all over the City. $250,000 was spent on defending the current Mayor (running for reelection with no competition) on his sheer lack of judgement. Here, again, I could cite many more examples of waste from my records including taxpayers spent on a defunct grocery store on South Adams years ago.
I'll conclude. Why was a multi-million bridge built across Knoxville when it was obvious an outlet would soon be made from Junction City onto Knoxville? The new stop and go signal is approximately 20 feet from the lightly used bridge.
Peoria Public School District #150, now erroneously had a name change costing thousands of dollar. The situation at #150 is so bad I am not going to attempt to relist them. Read my previous blogs. I met an 88 year old woman whose daughter retired from #150. Her ending salary was $60 some thousand a year and her pension is now $40,000 a year. She has a relative just retired from a college and has a pension approximately 60%.of this relatives salary. The mother is not bragging, she is not a happy camper. I have an acquaintance who taught and coached a little tennis at #150 who draws a $70,000 a year pension. His wife also affiliated with #150 is or will draw around $90,000 a year pension. Another friend affiliated with #150 draws a combined pension or of over $120,000.00 according to an article printed by the JSEB many years ago. #150 pays coaches of minor sports 11% of their salary. At one time, I helped coach as an unpaid volunteer at #150 and was responsible for new tennis courts up by the Manual school building. This year Manual appears that it is not going to have either a boys or girls teams. For a number of years, The Manual coach had never hit a tennis ball and relied on two previous graduates to "coach" the teams. Competitive results printed in the JS on 10/6/10, showed Manual and Central combined wins of 8 games while losing 216 games. (See my blog, "Tennis Competion - Peoria Public Schools) The Central coach and his wife brought lawn chairs to sit in at Bradley Park. One of maybe both were being paid 11% of their salaries.
Enough. No new taxes. Elect stronger and retired people who know how to run a business. I know that is impossible because there are maybe only 3-4 with successful business backgrounds on the combined County, City and Park Board.
Out of a combined 36 "Board" members. We, I guess, are responsible to the huge fiscals debts now and rising on the future. NO NEW TAXES. Let those who got us into this shape figure it out.
So sad and the bragging about how well the economy is doing is false. Prepare yourself for the massive depression on the horizon.
No comments:
Post a Comment