Tonight the council votes on the bonds for the Events Center;
The City Council is expected to approve the sale of $125 million in bonds at its meeting tonight, the largest bond issue in city history. The money would build a $115 million events center, provide a reserve fund to pay off the bonds and pay issuance costs.
Officials sold the plan as one that would be paid off in 22 years. But they are leaving room to extend that. The ordinance being considered tonight leaves the city the option of extending that to 25 years. Other key details of the ordinance include a maximum interest rate of 4.75 percent for tax-exempt bonds and the option for the city to also sell a mix of taxable bonds, which carry higher interest rates.
It will be interesting to hear the debate tonight and if any councilor has the backbone to bring up the ‘Bait & Switch’ by the finance department and the mayor’s office.
(I WILL PROVIDE AN UPDATE AFTER VIEWING MEETING)
The TJN Recycling Yard was approved.
I’m sure MMM wouldn’t do something like that would he???
Notice there was very little debate before the vote.
That’s because Mike Cooper threatened them by saying that if this “deal” fell through, TJN would be back at the Stockyards (where BTW, they already had the correct zoning w/o even having to go before the Planning Commission!!!).
I was talking about the bond deal, but you are right about the TJN deal.
Who’s the brokerage? A certain supreme court case decision will be forwarded showing them the city can’t be sued (city ordinance 2-66) in case of default. If they’re not democracy, they should be barred from US financial markets.
PL – I got a call about this the other day from a South DaCola foot soldier. He had to go suddenly so I never got a full explanation, but an interesting point. Wonder if anyone else knows about this?
Question for the masses:
The election language mentioned a resolution that the Council had passed indicating that they (the Council) would support the bonding if the measure passed. I can’t seem to find this resolution, and I was wondering what the language in this resolution was. Did the resolution indicate a bonding limit ($115M?) or a specific repayment schedule (22 years?). If so, exceeding either of these would seem to invalidate the resolution and free a councillor to vote against the bonding issue.
Of course, even if this is all correct, I don’t expect many (or any) of the councillors to have the guts to go against the “will of the voters”, even if they voters have been baited-and-switched. And there’s no way a majority could vote against it.