By: Diane Benjamin
Budget – PDF page 56 https://www.cityblm.org/home/showdocument?id=24029
We have no idea when life will return to normal, but government needs to scale back now. The only receipts that may increase is the Utilities Tax since a lot of people are at home. All the X tax receipts will be effected, how many businesses will even survive to produce revenue for government in the future?
Bills and Payroll: https://www.cityblm.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=24210
The usual:
Admin PCard spending:
Tari didn’t go to One Voice, I wonder is the flight was refunded.
How does a $1400 bill get paid twice?
The question is: Would the Pantagraph still be in business today, if it was not a paid branch of the city government?
…and Water, Sewer, and Utility revenues would also be affected as many businesses and student residences sit idle. Using ‘back of the napkin’ numbers, Bloomington needs to find $5M to cut from the budget.
…which then implies Normal will need to cut $2M, probably more with ISU students (and their money) gone for half a semester. I expect the Town will be filing for bankruptcy, since they publicly indicated last year during property tax discussions that it is absolutely impossible for them to find even less than 1/20th of that amount to cut.
And no amount of Uptown marketing enhancements is going to make any difference now. Normal is done, if the student cash cow doesn’t obediently drop off millions of dollars into the town’s economy. It’s almost like Mayor Koos bet-the-farm that everything in Normal would stay exactly the same for the next 20 years?
The financial toll this crisis will have on government and ultimately taxpayers will be enormous. Projected revenues will fall short. It may take decades, if not longer, to fully recover.
I believe local governments should become frugal with non-critical project spending so resources can be diverted to protecting life-safety and maintaining critical infrastructure and services.
Public safety trumps luxury, PERIOD. We can get back to luxury and amenity project spending after this passes.
A financially responsible city government must handle the people’s priorities and prepare for unforeseen disruptions. The Koos led city government spends money like it is growing on bushes in our back yards and has borrowed (a lot) of money to finance the Uptown ISU student marketing movie set.
The Age of Exponential Technological change seems to be invisible to the leadership in this area. They still operate in a world that exists only in their minds while clinging to the belief that what happened before will continue to happen EXACTLY the same way in the foreseeable future.
It’s a new world EVERY DAY of the week and the speed of change is going to do nothing but accelerate the change we see happening all around us.
We need pragmatic highly adaptable visionary leadership that can chart a course for the area that will provide first a soft landing from the current 20th Century oriented path of silliness and then a plan to move the area into the 21st Century world/economy with things like fiscal responsibility, regulation changes and tax relief.
It is my hope that this visionary leadership will arise and be elected in both cities to meet the existing and coming challenges ahead. I am afraid that with our existing leadership, we are headed to become the next Decatur on the Prairie.
I’d REALLY LOVE to see the shithole that’s called “uptown” go so broke that it gets bulldozed, THEN we can build “charming” buildings once again and have a NICE place to visit and shop. and Koos will have LEFT a legacy- in the landfill!
“never let a good crisis go to waste” says Rahm Emanuel . By the time this is all over with Koos/Renner will have eliminated the councils and Bloom/Normal will become a dictatorship. Before this,they were close,but now with “special” powers being granted,the pace of Koos/Renner empire will be accelerated and the citizens? Well,they will be paying the tabs for this for decades.
Paraphrasing from Star Wars ” the more they tighten their grips , the more people will slip away. “And ,”Is this how democracy disappears,with thunderous applause . Those two lines(paraphrased) have always stuck in my head,and now they are coming to Bloom/Normal very soon! Time to get out of dodge before the royals build moats around Bloom/Normal and fill them with piranhas and set guards at the borders keeping people in!