Fort Wayne City Council and the K2 ordinance
Posted by Mike Sylvester - 8/26/10 @ 4:34 pm - Filed Under City Council, Featured
There are a whole lot of important items that the Fort Wayne City Council needs to address; however, K2 is not one of them.
It is hard for me to believe that our City Council has wasted so much time regulating another substance that likely only need to be regulated for minors.
Here are some ideas for the Fort Wayne City Council to spend time on rather than regulating substances like K2:
- The City pension funds are underfunded; this deserves serious attention.
- The City and other local Economic Development groups have given numerous tax incentives to companies who have completely failed to do the items they promised they would do in order to qualify for these tax credits.
- Navistar is pulling out of Fort Wayne over the next three years and this will damage our City badly.
- The City of Fort Wayne is going to have serious budget problems over the next couple of years.
There are many more items I could list; however, I think these four are sufficient.
I am disappointed that our City Council decided to regulate K2 for adults.
I have to admit that the first time I ever heard of K2 was the press coverage on the topic due to the proposed city ordinance. That leads me to beleive that K2 is not a huge issue; at least not as important as the three items listed above…
Mike Sylvester
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7 Responses to “Fort Wayne City Council and the K2 ordinance”
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Mike - Could you please list some specifics in regard to companies that have received property tax abatements and have not followed through on what they promised to enable them to receive these?? City Council receives a yearly report from the Redevelopment Department on this subject and I don’t recall hearing about what you are stating is a”numerous” occurrence.
John,
If I had the time I could go and look through the records; unfortunately, I am taking 3 MBA classes right now and working…
It happens with a lot of frequency because companies ask for tax abatements and promise to create a specific number of jobs; then later something happens to where they can no longer create those jobs.
Mike
The promises that are made to get the abatements are sometimes so vague that there would be no way to verify if they are actually being met.
If a company were ever called out on it, they could probably dole out some excuse such as - “Although we promised to create ten new jobs, and we have actually only created two, without the abatement we would have cut eight. So there actually is a net gain of ten jobs.”
As long as they said this with a straight face, it would probably pass.
@ Mike -
“It is hard for me to believe that our City Council has wasted so much time regulating another substance that likely only need to be regulated for minors.”
I’m in total agreement.
I have no idea what’s in K2 and I think people who use it are nuts. As far as I know, it has no track record and hasn’t been studied.
But that’s no reason to ban it for adults. If you want to be the guinea pig, be my guest.
Given our budget problems, wouldn’t it have made more sense to simply tax it? People will get it anyway and the schools could use the money.
….and now that the City has banned K2, no one can figure out when they can start enforcing the ordinance. One attorney says one thing, while another says something different…and our tax dollars pay them. TV says the police have no procedure to police the stuff.
Another comedy of errors, courtesy of the City.
When GM first came to Fort Wayne, they promised thousands of jobs. The thought was they would hire the recently let go International Harvester workers. After spending millions on land, interchange we learned they were transferring people from other areas here.
I think a more important task would be to get a handle on the pickup time their garbage truck contract states they can begin operation. It probably only affects about 1 to 2% of the people, but to be woken at 5:30 AM on the day the kids, have a half hour delay going to school really sucks. I have called them about this. I am told the garbage collection contract gives an exemption to the noise ordinance that states no use of heavy equipment (lawn mowers, etc) before 8:00 am and after 8:00 pm.
I suggested they create different routes: reverse the pickup route every other week so that the same citizens are not overly burdened every week. This would only relieve 50% of the burden, but it is better than nothing.
Instead they spend all this time on regulating a product that apparently is not illegal to sell or buy. Rather like the dry counties in Kentucky.