The City-County Council in a surprising twist sent a proposal to provide $18.5 million in public subsidies to allow Angie's List to build a new parking garage and provide for the renovation of the old Ford building after relocating an IPS warehouse from the building back to committee for more vetting. The council earlier delayed a committee vote on this same proposal until after Angie's List reported its 2014 fourth quarter financial results earlier this month, one of the rare occasions the company showed a profit in its two decade history. Are council members getting a bit uneasy about the real benefactors behind this real estate transaction?
UPDATE: The council also approved on a 19-10 vote funding for the controversial pre-K education program pushed so hard by Eli Lilly and the Matt Tully Circle Jerk Club. The $20 million payable over 5 years takes money from the city's reserve fund to fund the program. The opponents always had the stronger argument on this issue. After all, how can you justify spending on a brand new program outside the constitutional and statutory responsibility of municipal government when it's already failing in its job of providing adequate streets, sidewalks, lighting and a host of other city services to struggling neighborhoods? Proponents continued to make false claims about studies proving pre-K education improves educational attainment. The studies in actuality say nothing of the sort.
The biggest new disclosure made during the public testimony came from the mayor's education profiteer tool, Jason Kloth, who confirmed the children targeted by the program will include illegal aliens. The unelected, nongovernmental United Way of Central Indiana will get to direct the awarding of pre-K education scholarships. This could be a double sucker punch to the African-American community, which will be the group hardest hit by a move by the state legislature to eliminate state common construction wage requirements on publicly-financed construction projects in a further effort to depress wages paid to workers in the building trades. The construction companies pushing this legislation overtly discriminate against African-Americans and even white workers for that matter in hiring the growing illegal alien population.
7 comments:
Angie's List has been mismanaged and certainly shows no promise as a major taxPAYER investment.
This must be denied!
Late night Gary with good news...Watch your back bud.
Please post why Whole Foods backed out and Thyme is taking site...with TiF;s
Good move by the Council, hard to believe that this company could add 1000 employees when it's liabilities exceed it's assets and it continues to lose money each year.
Anon, I don't know why Whole Foods backed out of the project. I couldn't understand why they wanted to build another store at this location when they had another store a short distance away in Nora. Perhaps the company figured out they would be spending a lot of money to divert patrons from one store to the new store.
If City County Councilors were randomly chosen from the telephone book, the taxpayers would be better off than the ones currently in office.
I'm wondering if the reason it was passed back to committee was to delay the full vote (in support of corporate welfare) until after the May primary elections.
Remember that it's pocket before party and party before people.
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