By: Diane Benjamin
If you attended Alderman Kevin Lower’s Town Hall, you know very few people spoke in favor of Renner’s agenda for downtown. Two people who did support redevelopment own property downtown, including a parking lot by the Coliseum – Joe Haney and his wife.
From Bills and Payroll to be approved tonight:
http://www.cityblm.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=8901
Joe got a Harriet Rust Grant for his downtown business! It’s not the first time, being a friend of government pays! Getting paid also helps solidify support. I think this grant is for façade upgrades.
HANEY JOSEPH 00001 INV 07/27/2015 BHP-05-15 120896
1 10015420 79985 Planning HRustGrant 25,000.00
Invoice Net 25,000.00
CHECK TOTAL 25,000.00
Otherwise, this check run you got by cheap for outsourced legal and the bird-cage liner continues to profit from your tax dollars. Not much else exciting to see since I already wrote about the P-Card spending included tonight.
Harriet Rust likely rolled over in her grave. Idiots wasting my money again she said.
I wonder how many renter’s Joe has in that apartment building across the street from their office. I’ve been by there a few times recently and at most all I have seen are 2 units being used gauged by balcony usage. The others look to be empty and unfinished.
I can’t even imagine who would be renting at those rental fees much less live in that area. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there.
Maybe Joe should have let the building go to shambles and then try to get the city to buy it and he’d get a substantial sum of money. Why heaven’s yes that site has McDonald’s written all over it….to fit in with the White Elephant Dome.
Mayor Transparency does not award the grants of this nature; that comes from the Historic Preservation Commission. And, that group does not have any “planted people” on it.
One thing about Joe Haney is that he has been a hard working individual and has done so in this town for many years. I would venture to guess that he has paid his fair share of sweat and taxes in this town much more than the likes of developers like Huff that have literally gotten millions. The city has made huge mistakes by unwisely spending or giving away millions of $ at a time. Relatively speaking a $25K Harriet Rust grant isn’t the problem. If the city wasn’t pissing away millions at a time, possibly these much smaller grants might be serve to be beneficial to the recipient as well as a wise city investment.
On another note I saw that the Civic Center in Peoria is also losing money. Well duh. People aren’t working, jobs went over seas, trickle down effect is that more people have less money to spend on entertainment as paying for needs over wants is what the rest of us have to do. Many entertainment venues are seeing hard times.
It just beats me why anyone would dump money into that location. He might have been better off to have leveled the building and built a plumbing show room,
You’re right about people having less money for entertainment. A lot of people have been hit with higher medical premiums combined with wages not rising. Who knows in this economy if you’ll have a job the next day.
Every time I read another article about how wages have not risen I wonder if that is cash wages/benefits or total cost to employ a worker. I bet if somebody looked into I (I have it on my todo list but haven’t had time) they would find that we have indeed been getting raises but they are in the form of increased payments to the government because of extra regulations and Obamacare.
Raises do little good when the federal government does nothing to reign in what things cost. Not that I am downplaying true capitalism but it is crony capitalism that is much of the problem. Bailing out the banks and allowing corruption on a massive scale in regards to big business with minuscule fines and punishments is the problem. Socialism, communism, fascism,,,no good for America.