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RICK’S SPIN!
Posted on January 12th, 2013 5 commentsWHOM DOES HE SERVE?
The Lancaster Newspapers gave Mayor Gray the camera and microphone to campaign for a third term in office (click here). Unbelievable! Of course, the Lancaster Newspapers love him because he supports their hotel/convention center and Gray gets that into his spiel for them.The reporter never asks a question, by the Mayor’s opening two sentences he already knew the questions that were going to be “asked,” and they give him seven uninterrupted minutes to look into the camera and campaign.The transcript of the video on his goals for Lancaster is below. This is extremely important and it is not a long read. Please note the numbering is mine and in the first line of #8, the word “non-funded” is in brackets because I am not sure of the word he actually used.I will have much more to say on these in the days to come. Tomorrow, my much delayed “Best in Lancaster” list. Please also note the community meeting in this morning’s post below.***********************************What do I want to accomplish? I sat down and thought about it.1. First, I’d like to provide an atmosphere where large and small businesses can flourish and create jobs and opportunities for our residents.Often people say, well you spend too much time on trying to attract businesses and whatnot. Businesses coming here mean jobs here, mean the opportunity for people to work, mean the ability of walkable urbanity. They can walk to work and they can walk to their jobs. And the hotel/convention center is a perfect example of it. The last time I checked, 70% of the people that work there lived in the city. And it was a handshake agreement we had but they followed it.2. We want to provide new avenues for new business people to enter the economy and realize their potential.Start-up businesses, small businesses are really the backbone of this city though we have the Fulton Banks and the Lancaster General Hospital – the thing that makes the city of Lancaster great both in the neighborhoods and downtown as far as businesses are concerned, are the small businesses.3. We want to continue to promote the wonderful diversity in the city that makes us unique, interesting and intellectually challenging.4. We want to continue to improve the public physical assets of the city – the parks, the schools, the infrastructure and the arts. The more aesthetically beautiful a city is and structurally sound the better people feel about themselves, their community and their neighbors.5. We want to continue to improve neighborhood life through rigorous code enforcement. We want to continue to prosecute slum landlords – those that would come in and exploit our residents.6. We want to assure that the public gets the full benefit of each tax dollar spent. And my reputation in my office among my co-workers is I’m cheap. And it’s a reputation I like, really. And I am cheap.7. We want to continue to improve the efficiency of our public safety through more productive use of our police, fire and public works people and that’s a continuing, on-going thing.8. Finally, I want to continue to fight at the state level for the relief from [non-funded] mandates and procedures that work against the interest of the taxpayers. We really, ah, sometimes I feel like we’re not represented in Harrisburg though certainly our senator and our state representative do their best. You wonder who actually talks about the people who pay the freight – the people in the municipalities.5 responses to “RICK’S SPIN!”
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I apologize for the two different font sizes – I tried everything to make them the same and then gave up!
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After the convention center actually failed to attract a significant amount of conventions and property values are going down, Gray is now using jobs as a positive. How many of those jobs are actually good paying jobs? Let it fail!!!!!
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My question is who was his “handshake” agreement with? Who is “they?” The LCCCA or the PSP or both?
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talking January 13th, 2013 at 08:53
70% at the CC may live in the City, I will not attempt to dispute that. Just saying “70%” is meaningless. How many actual jobs are we talking about? How many min wage jobs? Lower level hourly jobs? Crappy temp serving jobs? How many “good” jobs did we get for $200 MILLION, what was the cost per job, and what better alternatives existed*?
*such as better job creators to support in the City, better public transport to get City dwellers to jobs throughout the County, etc.
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concerned citizen January 13th, 2013 at 10:24
Cost per job? Current staffing of the hotel and convention center COMBINED is about 170-180 “full time equivalents”, meaning many of these positions are part-time. The hotel has already received nearly $45 million in taxpayer subsidies, and pays no real estate taxes. The convention center costs taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 million or more per year, about $1 million goes toward operational losses and the rest toward the $64 million in outstanding construction debt.
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