Wrecked

The proposal to build a $6.5 million indoor recreation center sits on the edge of the city budget like some of the DWI wrecks the cops like to haul in front of high school campuses around prom season. It stands a grizzly testament to the reckless behavior of city officials, who make very poor decisions while drunk on their own power. The hapless recreation center remains no closer to becoming a reality than it did more than two years, when the equally hapless administration of Valerie Keehn goaded the City Council into selling bonds for the project.

Only now, the economy is in what appears to be a death spiral and city residents are facing yet another property tax increase. Come next year, the average working-class homeowner –if there are any left –will be paying more than $1,110 in city taxes alone. And it’s not too reassuring to know that about a half-million of these inordinately high tax dollars will go toward paying interest rates on a non-existent recreation center. To put this in overly simplified terms, were the two years of interest on this bond distributed among each of the city’s 10,723 parcels, the bill would be about $49 per property.

Angry yet? Well then consider a handful of these property owners will happily pay this estimated interest cost in addition to exorbitant legal fees so that all the other property owners can face even more costs associated with stalling the project. These open-field loving NIMBYs are planning to file a ludicrously frivolous lawsuit against the city, arguing that a proper “environmental review” was never conducted. Simply put, their assertion is ludicrous. But this isn’t stopping the South Side wreckers from throwing what could be an industrial-sized wrench into the project.

“What Johnson doesn't realize is that this will cause a lot of resentment among the taxpayers, because we'll be footing the cost of defending the suit,” boasted Lee Pokoik, a member of the wreckers and a self-professed “part-time” city resident.”Next year he’ll be running for re-election and this will be cause for some people to want to throw him out of office...We can’t be wasting money on ridiculous lawsuits.”

Ahem. Filing ridiculous lawsuits? Wasting money? Isn’t that exactly what the South Siders are doing here? Provided a lawsuit is filed, any lawyer worth his salt would immediately file for an injunction to prevent construction from beginning. And provided they can keep the injunction in place for the next seven months, they might just land the city into a financial quagmire. After all, the city is supposed to spend the first $1.8 million of the recreation center bond by April. To date, no city official has indicated exactly what will happen if these funds are not spent.

Eventually, these wastrels will run out of money and their case will be thrown out of court, but not before they cause untold damage to the project’s budget. Speaking of budget, who’s to say the building could even be built for the estimated $6.5 million? The cost of everything from asphalt to aluminum has skyrocketed since the Keehn Administration adopted this bastard project as its own back in 2006. Not to mention, the cost of heating the cavernous center during the winter has most assuredly increased, which is something Linda Terricola probably didn’t figure into the equation when she said the building would “pay for itself.”

The boondoggle has left Mayor Scott Johnson in a sort of quandary, perhaps the first of his 10-month-old administration. He’s gone too far to scrap plans for locating the center on the south side, which is quite clearly the best location for the building if any exists at all. He’s also facing an economy where sales tax is down, mortgage tax receipts are dropping to their lowest rates this century and the city’s departments are pining for budget allocations that would increase taxes by 29 percent. And next year could be even worse.

Sadly, it seems as though the recreation center simply doesn’t fit into any plan to downsize the city’s over-inflated budget. No matter what its proponents say, the building will require city staff and city-funded utilities to operate, meaning there will be a cost to homeowners even after the bond is paid off. So it’s probably time to investigate what it would take to hatchet the whole project, even though this would regrettably give a handful of overly vocal obstructionists the endgame they have sought since a certain vapid former mayor galvanized them last winter.

In theory, the city could simply pay off the bond and suck up the hundreds of thousands already paid in interest. It might just be Johnson’s only way out from underneath an incomprehensibly stupid decision by the Keehn-lead council to bond a project that wasn’t anywhere near ready for construction. Perhaps the council could throw in a few extra dollars to purchase a plaque for the South Side fields: Here was the last stand of the greatest tax-funded waste under the failed Valerie Keehn administration.