• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Spaced out

Those mean, stingy county officials just wouldn't go along, and the mayor is sad, so unbearably sad:

"The dream of a joint solution to Fort Wayne's and Allen County's space needs through co-location just died,” a somber Mayor Tom Henry said in a hastily arranged news conference Thursday afternoon.

But who killed it? City and county officials identified vastly different culprits.

Well, he should be somber, and more than a little embarrassed. As County Councilman Paul Moss notes, the city and county are already co-located and have been for a long time. Mayor Henry is the one who used a simple, specific need -- for new police headquarters -- as the excuse to rush into purchase of Renaissance Square and to pressure the county into coming up with the money to help fix up the building and move all city and county offices around sufficiently for taxpayers to not know where to go for what.

At least County Council members, right now the only political body in the county worthy of being described as fiscally responsible, had the sense to say, unanimously "Are you nuts?" and refuse to commit the money. So now the city is stuck with the $14 million tab for purchase and renovation of Renaissance, which will become City Hall, and the City-County Building will become strictly a county operation.

Who killed the dream? That is the most unnecessary question of the year.

Comments

gadfly
Fri, 11/20/2009 - 7:36pm

The Mayor's office listens not to the majority of citizens who have opposed the city's spend ,spend, spend policies which included Harrison Square, the Calhoun Street widening, the City Light Lease/I & M fiasco, the contaminated Omni Source property, and the former Dimension Ford property purchase. On top of these unnecessary outlays comes the Rennaisance Square building.

Much of this unnecessary use of local taxpayer money comes at a time of high unemployment and the worldwide economic downturn that will burden taxpayers further, especially when leftist Democrats have adopted expensive ineffective methods to turn the economy around, insist upon wallet-flattening universal healthcare, and demand economically insane and scientifically wrong environmental policies which can only turn us into a third-world banana republic.

Fort Wayne also must pay the piper on its deteriorating sewer infrastructure. It is not unrealistic to believe that taxpayer funds may soon dry up, Fort Wayne will then discover that it is not too large to go bankrupt. Most municipal governments in Indiana are cutting back on employees and service and we continue to expand government.

Question: If the city does not own the Police Academy, who does . . . and why is taxpayer money being spent to operate it? I know that Mayor Richards spent a large sum of our money to purchase and flatten the entire Southtown Mall property.

Quantcast