About: John B. Kalb
- kalb@fortwaynepolitics.com
- Profile
- Born in Minnesota in 1935. Grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, western suburb of Cleveland. Family moved to Fort Wayne in 1949 as I started in high school. Grad of North Side, 1953, the General Electric Apprentice School as a toolmaker, BSEE from Purdue in 1961. Have lived in Fort Wayne since 1949 except years at West Lafayette at Purdue and two years in upper New York state with G.E. on engineering training program. Went into sales engineering in 1968 and sold for the R.L.Guimont Co., Inc.(machine tool components and inspection equipment) for 39 years, retiring in July of 2007. Active in my parrish, Emmanuel Lutheran on Jefferson Blvd., have sung in church choirs for over 65 years (tenor). Married Judith Holloway in 1969 - we have four children, Mike, Carrie, Mary, and Katrina; eight grandkids; our cat, Venus (who really believes she owns the place) and three grand-dogs. Big Purdue Baseball, Football and Basketball fan; hope to live to see Purdue men win a final four (maybe 2009!!!) Active in Engineering Societies - Fort Wayne Engineer's Club, American Society for Quality and Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Educational Foundation International Scholarship Committee; the Northeast Indiana Engineer's Week Committee; Indiana Future City Competition Steering Committee.
Posts by John B. Kalb:
Finally!!!
1/30/12 @ 10:12 pm
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Jim Howard to Address the CBC on 12/5/2011
12/4/11 @ 7:58 pm
Just a note to let you know that Jim Howard, past Director of Purchasing for the City of Fort Wayne will be addressing the Conservative Breakfast Club tomorrow morning at 7:30 in the Window Garden Cafe on the 13th floor of One Summit Square building. You can buy your breakfast or just come to comunicate! We alway finish prior to 8:45.
Filed Under Local Politics | 3 Comments
The Changing of Times in Downtown Fort Wayne
12/2/11 @ 12:29 pm
Filed Under Uncategorized | 6 Comments
Have a Happy
11/24/11 @ 1:35 pm
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
How non-elected commissions spend tax funds
11/15/11 @ 2:16 am
At this afternoon’s Redevelopment Commission meeting we were again able to watch a non-elected group spend lots of property tax funds for purposes with very questionable authority and/or economic justification - (and, if you attended this meeting, you were left in the dark on just how much they spent since only the commission members and a few city employees had copies of the resolutions!):
Resolution 2011-19 - This was approved to spend $150,000 of Centenial Industrial Park Urban Renewal Area TIF dollars for changing 123 street lights over to LED lighting. The cost savings in electricity expense was estimated at $7000 per year for the 123 lights as compared with the existing system. The city engineer was asked two questions before the vote: 1) What would the cost have been to replace the lights with standard sodium vapor lighting units? He didn’t have the data and 2) What would be the dollar savings in replacement of burned-out sodium-vapor lamps as compared to the cost to replace the LED lamps? Again, he did not have the answer. A Redevelopment employee stated that the “pay-back” period for the $150,000 would be 6 years. So that’s $150,000 less 6 times the $7000 ($42,000) or $108,000 remaining to be saved over this same 6 years - or $108,000 per year. Even if the city’s cost is $50.00 per hour - that would mean 360 hours per year for the 123 light fixtures - or 3 hours per year per fixture! But, a non-elected commission spending other peoples money could care less about any cost-saving payback, I guess.
Resolutions 2011-20,21,22 and 23 were approved, with all of them being paid with our commision’s favorite “slush-funds” the Economic Development Area’s TIF dollars. Remenber, each EDA with a TIF district was formed to, “allow the development of an area that the city declared ‘could not be developed without the fiscal help of property taxes generated by this specific development over a 50 year (later a 30 year) period’” The douments establishing this “area-in-need-of-development” listed the planned development of what became, for example, “Apple Glen and Jefferson Pointe shopping centers”. As it turned out for this area, due to the private developers planning, very little funding was required for the infrastructure improvments over that paid for by them. So, at the present time, this Jefferson/Illinois Road TIF is generating over $ 3,500,000 per year, accumulating in the city fund # 317 and will begin generation of additional dollrs per year as the new Courtyard Hotel begins to pay property taxes. Three times now, the Redevelopment Commission has expanded this Jefferson/Illinois Road EDA so it would have a place to spend these large amounts of cash! The alternate , per Indiana Code, would have been for the commission to declare the project “complete” and to return any future property tax revenue to the normal property tax levy principals - our Fort Wayne Community Schools, operating funds for city government (Police and Fire Department costs), et al. 2011-20 was approved for replacement of pedestrian and traffic lighting at the Jefferson rail underpass just west of the intersection with West Main Street. 2011-21 was approved for the replacement of the dead Ash trees with other species - at a cost of $19,110 for the Washington Center/Coldwater Road TIF area and about the same in the Jefferson/IUllinois Road area. 2011-22 was approved to ratify and approve acquisition costs for 15 properties on the West side of Ewing Street across from Parkview Field and including the property at the Southwest corner of Jefferson and Ewing. The purchase of these was approved at a special meeting of the commission on June 23 of this year. All of these now belong to the city and are no longer on the property tax roles. The city has no plans for these properties. 2011-23 was approved to ratify and approve expenditures related to demolition of the existing buildings on the above properties. I question, again, how these properies can be purchased with TIF dollars since they are located OUTSIDE the latest Jefferson/Ilinois Road EDA. Greg Leatherman will again use the justification, “these parcels of land are “serving” the EDA” - which is a long stretch of his imagination!!!
Then, in other business, Leatherman asked for and received approval to spend up to $80,000 to make the property sold to The New Harrison LLC for The Harrison complex “Build-Ready”. This will involve digging and hauling 5000 to 6000 cubic yards of dirt, clay, sand, et al out of the pit that will become the underground parking garage for The Harrison. So this is another amount that taxpayers are being charged for the privilege of allowing “The New Harrison LLC” to build a building that will be owned by them - even though about one half of it’s cost is being paid with public funds!
And then finally, Leatherman stated, for about the 50th time, that the project is “A GO” (even though the New Market tax credits have not yet been sold). I guess we can assume that the addional $80,000 will be added to the $200,000 cap on the city’s cost if the Harrison is not built within the time-frame called out in the The New Harrison LLC agreement.
We are getting deeper and deeper and deeper into this thing - And what does the Fort Wayne Corporate entity get in return?
NOTHING!
Filed Under Local Politics | 7 Comments
How we could have avoided looking at 2.9% Property tax hike
9/25/11 @ 9:59 pm
Tom Henry’s announced plan to increase the property tax levy by the max. allowance of 2.9% for next year will generate $3 million more property tax. Just to put this into perspective, one of the city’s many TIF funds will next year increase well over $4.4 million from property taxes - that’s the Jefferson Illinois Road Economic Development Area TIF - fund # 317. So all the talk about how the use of these “give-aways” is not a tax increase is shown up for it’s falsehood! Remember that little, if any, of the funds generated by the Apple Glen/Jefferson Pointe development have been used within the original area of the EDA - it wasn’t needed because the developers used their own money to create the most profitable mall in the region - they did it the old way instead of sucking on the public teat. So it looks like our property taxes ARE going up just so we can support the development of Harrison Square, an area that was “tacked on” to the Jefferson Illinois EDA to enable the multi-million dollar purchase of the properties which were given at a $17.50 price to Hardball Capital for our unneeded new downtown ballpark.
Quoting Matthew Continetti in last week’s Weekly Standard, “In today’s economy, risks are socialized while profit is privatized. The government uses deficit spending (or tax diversions) to shape investment decisions and supports markets that otherwise wouldn’t exist.” (Words in brackets are my addition.)Boy does this ever define our Fort Wayne Redevelopment Commission’s actions in the last 5 years! (Including the recent decision on the New Harrison!).
Filed Under Local Politics | 15 Comments
How to get a bank to fund an uneconomically planned project
9/20/11 @ 11:17 pm
Apparently the “New Harrison LLC” (the Company) could not convince the PNC loan officers that the project would be profitable to the extent that the Company would be able to pay back the money that they were asked to loan them. So they required that PNC be absolutely risk free in the transaction! The Company members (Hagerman, Whitley Manufacturing & Barry Real Estate) also saw that this was a very, very risky investment and henceforth required some reduction in their risk. The Henry administration, through the Fort Wayne City Corporate Counsel, Tim Haffner, came up with a “borderline” scam using the Economic Development Area state law (IC-36-7-14) to insure that the members and their creditor could not lose anything in the 7 year borrowing period! This over and above the fact that a majority of the project’s actual cost is being paid through a series of public fund dipping PLUS the fact that $50,000 per year Hardball Capital will be paying the city over 7 years will be placed in a “Residential Growth Fund” which will pay ”an amount equal to the “Gross Rent Minimum” (an amount to be determined by the city and the company prior to closing) in the top 2 floors of the building should they not be rented (or the residents fail to pay?)! If you remember, this yearly payment by Hardball is due to the failure of Barry/Hardball to complete the Harrison in a timely manner, as they promised when this whole Harrison Square boondoggle was approved by City Council and our former mayor.
- First. the land for the New Harrison is being sold by the city to the Company for $675,000 and the Company will pay interest only for the first 7 years. At the end of 7 years, the Company will begin paying (to the city) a monthly amount to complete the payment of principal and interest over the next 10 years. The cost of this part of the Harrison Square land was over $1.5 million plus the cost of the buy-out by the city of the multi-year lease that Subway had with the owner of one of the parcels.
-Second, New Market Tax Credits of $15 million assigned to the Company. This means that 39% of the $15 million ( or $5,850,000) of some corporation’s income taxes will have to be paid by the rest of our narion’s taxpayers just so that the Company gets to sell these tax credits, at a discount, to generate cash for the project - estimated to be 72% of the $5,85 million - or $4,212,000!
- third, The State of Indiana has pledged $4 million in CREED tax credits. This means that some corporation that owes income taxes to the state will get to write-off this amount, of course meaning that other Indiana taxpayers will have to make up this amount, or the state doesn’t get the money. When these credits are sold, again for about 72% of the $4 million, the company will get another $2, 880,000 in cash for the project!
These last two are examles of how a corporation like General Electric can end up oweing no income taxes for a full year or more!
-Fourthly, the city is responsible for infrastucture improvements to be paid by the city. These were to be covered in the July 20, 2007 development agreement in Exhibit E. But, on the city web site under where this agreement is located, Exhibit E is blank. So it appears that the amount required to be spent for this is unknown to the public.
So, for a proported $14.5 million project, at least one half of it (approximately $7.25 million) is being financed through tax revenues plus the city used over $1.5 million to purchase property which it is selling to the Company at at least an $825,000 loss. Plus all the provisions for eliminating any “at-risk” investment by PNC and the members of the Company.
What a great “give-away”!!!
And to top it all off, over 30% of our Fort Wayne “downtown” property is now “property tax exempt”! Really great growth for the future guys.
Filed Under Local Politics | 5 Comments
A very good place for the City Light $’s
3/4/11 @ 9:34 pm
Bob Caylor on Thursday in the News-Sentinel wrote a news report, “Design work approved for $25M pump”. He reported that the Fort Wayne Board of Works had approved the final design work on the second most expensive part of the work required under the consent decree that the city negotiated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed in 2006. The total estimated construction cost of this part of the work is estimated to be $25 million.
Members of the Legacy Fort Wayne Task Force, Mayor Tom Henry, and the Fort Wayne Common Council Members need to move toward approving the use of the required funds from the Fort Wayne Community Trust Fund to pay for this part of the project. Why? Well, for, starts the source of this fund was the investment made by City Utilities back when City Light was run by them. And the funds for this investment came from the City Light rate-payers - NOT from any taxes! So for once let’s use funds generated in the past to pay for a required improvement to our city - instead of expensive bonding that pushes the costs onto our kids and grandkids !!
Now I’m sure that someone is going to say that the feds will be paying for a portion of this - well who do the feds get this money from?? Of course it’s us, the taxpayers! And with the inflation we are going to see due to the Federal Reserve’s printing of money, any savings that we have are going to buy much, much less in the near future.
Filed Under City Council | 11 Comments
Pick’en
2/25/11 @ 4:01 pm
Our country has failed three times in “pick’en”:
1) Way back when, we should have picked our own cotton,
2) Then, later, we should have picked our own fruits & vegetables, and
3) Last, we should NOT have picked a “community organizer” as our President in 2008!
Filed Under 2008 National Elections | 18 Comments
Who to Believe?
2/3/11 @ 11:52 pm
Bob Caylor wrote a news item in Wednesday’s News-Sentinel about Paula Hughes’ suggested program to reduce the city debt. One of our Democratic bloggers was asked his opinion of this suggestion and his response was not very clear as to the figures he quoted. I sent an e-mail to Bob in re this and thought some of you might be interested - so here -
To: Bob Caylor:
Dear Bob:
In Wednesday’s News-Sentinel you had an article outlining one of our Republican mayorial candidate’s city debt reduction program. In this piece you quoted Keven Knuth, as a spokesman for Mayor Tom Henry’s campaign as saying, “as of January 1 (2011?), the city’s obligations totaled $129 million. You then state that Knuth’s numbers did not include some items. The difference is a huge $355 million!
Where did I get this figure? Per Pat Roller’s report to the 2011 Legacy Fort Wayne Task Force on January 27, 2011, the city’s “Net Debt per Capita” as of that date was given as $1,811. Since Fort Wayne’s population, per Mayor Tom’s State of the City address was given as 30% more than that listed in the 2000 Census (205,727) or 267,445 - that calculates to a debt of $484,343,000 or over 3 times what Knuth stated!
So, who is correct, our high-paid CPA Comptroller and our high-paid mayor - or a political hack???
Don’t you feel that a clarification is in order?
John B. Kalb
