Clueless

Apparently, someone didn’t get the memo. Rather than beating sense into Ron Kim, someone appears to have inadvertently beat the sense out of the dreadfully misguided Public Safety Commissioner.

Sporting a nice shiner and an oversized bandage on his forehead, Kim told New Channel 13 about his plan to use the $4.3 million bonded for the long-awaited recreation center into the public safety facility. He said moving the money over would be “easy” for the city to do, given the present economic climate.

“That money from the rec center, if we are in tough economic times, can be shifted over to the public safety station,” he said during the interview.

Clearly, Kim doesn’t recall former city Finance Commissioner Matt McCabe saying the money bonded for the recreation center couldn’t be used for other purposes without damaging the city’s financial reputation. And obviously, Kim doesn’t remember his partner in politics –former Mayor Valerie Keehn –committing the city to the project. Nor does he seem to recollect the downgrading of the city’s credit rating just one short year ago.

Kim also forgets how his patron goddess figured to finance the recreation center project by using parkland fees collected from developers. At the time, Keehn was stumping for re-election under the looming prospect of having to raise city property taxes by 8 percent. She claimed the roughly $300,000 collected in developer fees and used “for park, playground or other recreational purposes” could cover more than half the project.

“We believe the city is now in the position to finance at least 50 percent of the indoor recreation facility through subdivision, condominium and site plan recreation fees," Keehn told the Daily Gazette last year.

These aren’t things that cross the mind of the cross commissioner, as he furiously argues for a public safety facility that is still more than $1.7 million over what the city has budgeted. Mayor Scott Johnson, one of the prime suspects in giving Kim his new eye coloring, has repeatedly stated that the public safety facility proposals are stalled for just this reason. After all, why would the city bond $8 million for a project that is sure to go over budget? Isn’t this the whole reason why Moody’s dropped the city’s credit rating?

Meanwhile, Johnson says tax payers have flung more than $250,000 out the window –just short of what Keehn’s highly touted developer fees –in bond payments for the political football called the recreation center project without a single shovel being lanced into the ground. With more than a decade’s worth of planning, the recreation center has remained mired in the City Council’s inability to come to a consensus on anything, much less a $6.5 million project.

Absent from the discussions of both the proposed public safety facility and the bonded recreation center project are any discussions on how the city will finance the upkeep on what will total more than 60,000 square feet of additional government-owned building space. McCabe warned of such a problem last year, both before and after the council sold more than $9 million worth of bonds to fund the recreation center.

Conversely, Kim has excluded such discussions from his agenda and hasn’t even said exactly what the city would do with the old police station once a new one is built. In fact, he hasn't even said where the city would come up with the money needed to complete the new station in the first place.

The sad reality is that city councils of the past draped the albatross of the recreation center around the city’s neck. Unfortunately, neither of the previous mayoral administrations ever envisioned the hostile economic conditions existing today and put money behind what Kim is now categorizing as an lower priority project. But at this point, the only way to ease this burden is to at last complete the project and hope Linda Terricola’s ludicrous claims come to fruition.