Metropolitan Rural

I normally don’t keep up that much with news from over on the Illinois side, but I heard this tidbit last night on KWMU while I was fixing dinner.  I stood there shocked in disbelief and then started laughing out loud.

Collinsville horse track seeks change in Illinois gaming law
 

COLLINSVILLE, ILL. (2008-03-26) A horse track in the Metro East is pinning its hopes for survival on the Illinois Legislature.Owners of Fairmount Park in Collinsville say to stay in business they must put in slot machines or enter into revenue sharing agreements with casinos. Illinois law would have to change for the track to do either.

Fairmount Park president Brian Zander said he had to lay off nearly 300 employees and shorten this year’s live meet racing schedule.

He said operating costs are rising, and for years casinos have been taking away business.

“It was a greatly unanticipated consequence,” Zander said. “But every other state has found a way to mitigate that impact.”

A major infrastructure bill in Illinois would expand gambling and also require casinos to share revenue with racetracks.

The measure passed the Senate in September, but it has run into opposition in the Illinois House.

© Copyright 2008

Wow, that’s just unbelievable to me. Imagine if Target were to get a politician to ask for Revenue sharing with Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart is cutting into their business.  The fact that t his has already passed a state Senate just floors me.  It is absolutely the antithesis of market competition. 

Realize to that this is REVENUE sharing and not PROFIT sharing.  They will not be asked to share some of their profits after all of their expenses, but their revenue that they collect on the top line. 

Just saw 2 news stories come across on the Mayor’s website:

Centene Statement- This is a statement released by Centene thanking the Mayor and his office for all their hard work in making the deal.  They, in typical corporate speak, say they are disappointed they could not get the deal worked out with Ballpark Village developers. 

Mayor Slay on Ballpark Village- This is Mayor Slay’s response to the Centene statement. 

Personally, I’m not exactly distraught that we won’t be giving away $78 million in future tax revenue to Centene.  It would have taken a long time to see them ever contributing tax dollars to the city at that rate. 

I just hope that the Mayor doesn’t feel like he’s got that money burning a hole in his pocket now!

I was checking on St. Louis City Elections website today and found the listed of registered candidates for the August Primary.  Currently, there are Democratic candidates filed for Circuit Attorney, Public Administrator, Sheriff and Treasurer.  There is also a long list of Ward Committeemen and Committeewomen listed (mostly democrat with just a couple of exceptions).

However, looking through the city ordinances online, I find no references to these committee positions.  What are they?  How do you qualify? 

Anyone out there have any information?

My wife and I share our Google Calendars.  It’s a great way for us to keep track of what’s going on and who’s doing what.  It’s especially valuable with only 1 car.  Because we can only be one place at a time, it’s nice to see quickly if there is something going on without having to make someone wait and talk with the wife to find out.

This morning, when I got into work, I checked the calendar to see what is going on today and through the weekend (I’m off work tomorrow, yeah!).  The wife had “Incredible Kid Day” listed for today.  I had no clue what that was, so I asked.  She sent me a link to Camp Fire USA’s Absolutely Incredible Kid Day.  It’s a day set aside every year to write a letter to your kids about how wonderful they are.  There’s even special stationary you can download to write your letter on.

So, with that kind of motivation, I thought I would share mine with you and maybe encourage you to do the same.

Dear eight-year old (as you were called at baseball practice last night),

Though I may get irritated sometimes by your noises, I’m usually irritated by something else besides you before you even start.  I still can’t imagine a better guy to spend time with.  Whether it’s tickling you on the floor to hear you laugh, playing catch out in the yard or just having a helper when I’m doing work around the house and yard, you give me the energy to keep life fun.

So, keep smiling, keep laughing and keep Dad moving and active.  I look forward to another year of hanging out and watching you learn more every day.  I hope I can provide a good example for you over the year and help you learn all kinds of cool stuff.  Besides, you teach me how to enjoy life, so it’s only fair that I repay you!

Love,

Dad

My family has discovered a way to help beautify our city.  The biggest help here is having a little boy around the house.  Anyone who has one knows about little boys and their fascination with sticks.  Take them for a walk around the block and see how many they bring back home if you let them.

That’s where it all begins with us.  We send him out to get a nice little pile of sticks.  We then send him out back with the loppers to cut said sticks into smaller pieces (hint:  little boys think this is pretty cool too).

Next comes another key part.  We’ve got  a small outdoor chimnea.  It’s like a little outdoor fireplace.  A little left over newspapers and a handful of our cut up sticks and we now have a small fire going that will generally burn out completely in just a little over 20 minutes.

What do you do with a small, contained fire in your back yard for 20 minutes?  Well, as you might have guessed from the title, you make S’Mores!  We grab the barbecue skewers to toast some marshmallows and hook those up with the chocolate and graham crackers and we’re all set.  It’s a great treat to have on a cool spring evening or any time of the year it’s not raining or wet. 

Plus, you’re helping to keep your neighborhood free from fallen branches without having to overfill the yard waste dumpster.  So, next time you are out shopping and you see one of those cute little outdoor fire pits, think how much cleaner you could help our city be with one of those! 

Sunday afternoon I decided to take a quick walk down to Macklind Ave. Deli to pick up some of my favorite beer (luckily this is one of the only places in the city I’ve ever found Boddington’s Pub Ale on the shelf).  As I was nearing the end of my block I saw a couple across the street standing in their front yard behind a nicely dressed woman standing in front of a large television camera on a tripod.

I was curious what the story would be about and what station was covering our neighborhood again.  As I got another couple houses down the street, I saw the police car parked at the corner.  Here’s the story from KSDK.

St. Louis Police Investigating Vandalism At Muslim Prayer Center

This prayer center has been open for probably 6-9 months (after seeing that building vacant for a year or more after we moved to the neighborhood).  They meet there a couple nights a week as is evident from the larger traffic of cars parked nearby.  This is at least the second time they have had windows broken since they moved in.

To see this building with it occupants outside talking with police and seeing about 8 of the large windows with holes in them made me extremely upset.  I consider my neighborhood a nice one, and to have some ignorant fools doing this sort of stuff irritates me.  I wanted to find whoever did it and have their mother’s smack them in the back of the head.  Surely she taught them better manners than that.

Later last night I was out for a walk with the kid and the dog.  I saw the holes covered up and the lights on with prayer services underway.  It brought a bit of a smile to my face to see they were persevering.   Hopefully our neighborhood can show them that we won’t put up with this type of behavior and that they are welcome here.

I was “teaching” again a couple nights ago.  I put that in quotes because it was actually a final exam so I mainly sat around and watched.  My work will come later when I start grading.

The class rooms get pretty warm with the doors shut, so they are typically open.  With not much to do, I  listened to the lecture from the class across the hall.  It was an economics class, one of my favorite topics.  I heard some very good explanations of GDP and the difference between Fiscal and Monetary policy.  I was quite impressed listening to the instructor, he seemed to know his stuff and did a good job of explaining things.

Then, just as I was leaving, I heard the discussion start on Highway 40.  I hung around my empty class room for a few extra minutes to hear what would be said.  I was sorely disappointed.  He had clearly fallen victim to media and PR on this one.  He talked about how the project would boost the local economy now by providing jobs for the construction workers and later by making it easier for people to get places to shop and spend money.  Of course, he also mentioned that he was using the highway for his commute, so it might be more benefit to him at the expense of others.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it ignores the social impact and incentives.  The wider highway makes commuting easier and adds incentives for people to live further away from work.  That will start to benefit home builder again of course, but will also continue to drive up demand, and thus prices, for gasoline. 

While I don’t have anything against building highways when they can really help, I also worry that we often focus too much on making things easier on people to drive and neglect to offer government incentives to NOT drive.  I guess there is too much lobbying money flowing to our politicians from the oil/gas and automotive industry to do anything else. 

We continue to try and teach people in this society to Reduce/Re-Use/Recycle.  Yet the government builds more and more roads to make it easy to drive further to use more fossil fuels, wear out cars faster and build new homes.  If we really wanted to follow the 3 R’s, we would offer incentives to:

• Reduce - fuel, vehicle and road consumption
• Re-Use - current housing stock
• Recycle - our tax dollars into programs the encourage more positive behavior

After my post yesterday, I started doing some investigation.  I have started work on a custom Google Map titled “St. Louis Tax Whores”  The plan is to show links and details of business tax incentives that have been given in the city.  Once I get a handful of entries done I will post the link to the map on here permanently for reference and make periodic posts as more are added.

Anyway, while doing this research, I wandered over to the city website and decided to look at press releases.  What better place to find out about these tax incentives than the very politicians who like to brag about them and how good they are for the city.

What I ran across very quickly was a recent press release from city Comptroller Darlene Green on the tax initiative on the recent ballot.  This press release was on 1/23/08, just a couple weeks before the voting.  The link is above, but I also have the full text below:

My office did not initiate this ballot measure, but on Feb. 5, city voters will decide on a half-cent sales tax increase. As comptroller of the city, I support any additional revenue for the city. However, in this case, city leaders should be requesting a lower increase balanced by increased funding from developments. My position on this has been consistent throughout the process.The city needs the tax revenue without question. Police and firefighters deserve to be paid more money. I support the pay increases and the need to meet pension obligations and fight crime. However, I think the city needs to make an immediate change in its development incentive policies before it can ask the public to pay for city expenditures that should be paid for by a growing tax base.As new developments crop up all over the city, new jobs are added to the city, and more and more people buy homes and condos in the city, the tax base should be growing at a rate to sustain the growth. It is up to city leaders to change old development incentive policies designed to begin the turnaround that we are now experiencing. The new policies should acknowledge the need to cover the costs of growth.

In doing so, we create funding to keep up with rising costs and show good faith to the public who should not be asked to shoulder these costs. The regressive nature of the sales tax threatens the retailers who have already moved in and taken a chance on the city as well as those retailers who contemplate the move here.

Changing outdated development incentive policies now will show average citizens that their hard-earned money matters as much as the wealthy developer.

I was SO glad to see this press release. It sort of restored my hope for politics. There are a few good and smart people out there after all.  Thanks Darlene.

Okay, can the election be over now?  I rarely watch TV and still I’m tired of the Presidential election. 

You know what else I’m tired of?  Taxes. 

Just back on the February 5th primary, city residents voted to increase sales tax in the city by a half cent.  The money is slated to fund pensions for firefighters and police as well as to higher more police.  See the mayor’s description of Proposition S here.  I voted against this.

 I’m not saying we don’t need more police, or that we should fund the pension funds for our public servants.  I did wander a few things about this though:

1. Why had we not been fully funding the pension obligations in the past?  If we said we were going to do it why are we not?  It is an obligation, not a nice to have, we shouldn’t be behind, period.
2. How many businesses have been lured to the city with property and/or sales tax exemptions (I’m thinking of a large new ball park myself)?  I mean, the Centene deal alone a while back would amount to $78 million.  Wasn’t it the Cardinal’s part of the deal to get Ballpark Village built and occupied?  Why must we offer more money to get it occupied for them?

Yes, Centene is promising 1200 new jobs downtown.  Even if their employees still pay the 1.5% city earnings tax, those 1,200 people would need an average pay of $4.3 million each per year to make up that amount of taxes in a year.  How many years was this tax abatement for?  I wonder, will they really bring all the jobs they say?  Will it really benefit the city more than $78 million to have them here?  I have my doubts. 

And while I’m thinking of it, isn’t that an unfair competitive advantage the government is giving them over their competitors?  What about competing firms in the city (or nation for that matter) that aren’t getting those tax breaks? 

In the mean time, I’ll keep paying the ever increasing sales tax rates to shop at my local city businesses.  (After all, I’ve got to make sure the owners of Centene get their full $78 million in their pocket instead of mine.)  All the while dreading the upcoming elections and hoping someone smarter than the average politician will show up on a ballot some day in the future.  It all just irritates me, maybe I’m just getting old?

Unfortunately, my demolition on our basement has slowed to a crawl the last few weeks.  With teaching 2 classes in addition to my full-time job, time has just been too precious.  I finish up with one of my classes this week and the other in 2 weeks.  I did get some time late last week to pull down about a quarter of the stuff to the floor.  I still need to get it cleaned up and out to the dumpster this weekend I hope. 

I also need to get some more electrical boxes to use with the light fixtures as I take them off the plaster.  My experience with the others is that there was no junction box and just the wiring poking through the plaster and the fixture just attached directly to the ceiling. 

All this work though has gotten me excited about getting the electrical work done and building my workshop in the garage.  My wife found a website for the St. Louis Woodworkers Guild.  Lucky for me, their next meeting is the evening before Good Friday which I should have off work.  So, I should be able to get my fix of wood working by meeting with some others to get some inspiration to really get started.