Northwest Indiana Comical Politics

NWI's Econmic Development Joke

The Mcdermott family has now succeeded in economically developing themselves.  In the process, they are destroying the value of property in south Hammond and north Munster -- possibly Highland.  All this for a possibility of some economic growth in ten years or longer.

First you need to take out tons of public money from Hammond and the rest of the State to make this happen.  That is for the Hammond morons who don't understand is economic undevelopment.  Then we have the millions of dollars of lost property value -- overnight in south Hammond, north Munster, and Highland.

All this for a roll of the dice.  If you look at Cabelas web site you will see that any projection of economic development is only "expected" or "probably" for any location it currently or is projected to have.  In one case where it was supposed to rejuvenate the downtown area of a city -- that is have economic development beyond the immediate area of the store -- it did not happen.  The RV gun toting crowd will come into Indianapolis Boulevard spend their money in the store on Chinese made camouflage clothing and then get back on the highway.  This will be good economic development for China and Nebraska (Cabelas headquarters) who I forgot the Mcdermotts Junior and Senior.

Any place else in the USA, except the most corrupt, this father and son relationship with industry would not be permitted.  They are nothing more than a flim flam team.  The result is going to cost NWI its future.

No one has addressed the basic question of what kind of a future does NWi want.  On one side you have so called high technology incubators and then your one economic development is a hunting and fishing emporium that is going to drive everyone that is part of the technology creative crowd out of Lake County. 

The quality of life and the people of Lake County are already driving the major developments east to the Porter and La Port Counties with some in the eastern part of Lake County.  Further the K-12 quality in Lake County keeps on going down. 

Maybe we are lucky that the Tommies are bringing in the RV crowd.  Who else would be here?   Go Tommy Jr. before you are done as mayor they will be tying horses to the town hall in Hammond.

Cabelas and the NWI Rednecks

Now the NWI rednecks have truly won.  Cabelas is going to come in and replace the Woodmare Country Club.  The only winner in all this is the local thieves call the Mcdermotts.  The father will be walking away with tones of money that I am sure he will eventually share with the family, i.e. the current Mayor.

I have never seen such a family of users of public positions for their own greed since Pastrick left office.  If thee is no law against this kind of behavior there should be.

Cabellas will provide nothing new for NWI except for a bunch of gun totting yahoos of the redneck variety; not that the people of Hammond and Gary are not already there.

The decision to sell the country club is the worst economic development decision so far made in NWI (maybe not, the RDA could be worse).  Both do nothing but put money in some people's pockets while providing nothing for NWI or the rest of the State.

How much does everyone think this is going to cost Lake County, Hammond, and the rest of the State in additional "incentives" to get Cabelas here?  They have already said the demand a big package.  By when is all this going to get paid back?

They are mostly providing low level retail jobs.  Even if there reach their optimistic projected sails figures of $100 million that does not stay here very little does. 

Cabelas is not even a sports store it is only known for hunting and fishing and in that mostly for clothing.

The joke here again is on the citizens of Hammond and NWI.  We have given up on some prime real estate, green space, to enrich the Mcdermott family while we ruin Hammond and really badly effect the value of property in south Hammond and in north Munster, effect down. 

It is sad to see the citizens of Hammond and NWI to be too much of a redneck set not to understand how negatively this will effect the quality of life in our area.  All the while the new family of corruption the Mcdermotts continue to pocket money.

NWI Officials Mastadons

Our elected officials should actually be characterized as mastodons, pre-historic animals, for their understanding of the Twenty-First Century.  Being mastodons, they belong to another era and are incapable of surviving in the current one by coming up with any policies that will achieve positive results.   Elected officials are taking the citizens of NWI for a big ride back to the Twentieth Century. 

This is fine in science fiction; but, in the real world it will result in higher property and income taxes and minimal improvements in jobs and future earnings.

Our State Legislators and mayors began this legislative term with the promise of getting some new State money for NWI to develop projects that “might” result in economic development for the region.  They ended up trying to protect funds received for the past ten years.  Now there is a group of people that take two steps backward for every step forward.  The reason for this is that these are mastodon projects.

The projects suggested were fitting for pre-1980s, at best for part of the 1990s, but not for 2005.  The major projects are focused on building transportation infrastructure to help economic development: airport, commuter trains, and bus lines.  These were great projects beginning in the 1950s but not today.  In the Twenty-First Century, no company or individuals will transfer to NWI because of these; nor have any been lost because these were not available. 

Now instead of getting money from the rest of the State, NWI will have to use over $11 million of its own gambling money with the people of NWI being taxed at restaurants.  Without forgetting the possibility of a local income tax, is there any wonder the Governor is supporting the spending of our own money?

These elected officials are like the generals who are always fighting the last war.  They are incapable of seeing where the future is going.  The problem for NWI is not the lack of transportation or lake front; the problem is an incompetent work force with no capability and effort invested in NWI to turn that around. 

Data released last week by the Census Bureau shows that people are not interested in moving to NWI.  The second fastest growing county in the Country between 2000 and 2004 was

Kankakee

,

Illinois

; over fifty miles from downtown

Chicago

.  After that were the counties in northwest

Illinois

bordering

Wisconsin

.  With no trains, planes, or buses (or lake front) in these counties, they by far outpaced NWI where

Lake

and Porter had no growth and La Port actually declined in population. 

NWI’s lack of growth is because of the lack of quality of life for creative Twenty-First Century individuals. The change in NWI with these new transportation projects is we will be poorer.  Public transportation is a financial albatross. Professional, educated workers are not going to move into an area in which the K-12 system produces functional illiterates and its higher-education network is being financially down graded in the 2005-2007 budgets.  If you have children and want to pay instate college tuition close to home were would you move to: northern

Illinois

or NWI?

Neither remediation of the lake front nor new modes of transportation is going to change the corruption in the

East Chicago

foundations, the McDermott political extortion machine, nor the continuing saga of jail sentences in

Gary

.  Who are these mastodons kidding?  What high-tech business would come here with their employees because of a super sporting goods store? 

When the voters realize that this is a new century and kick all these mastodons out of office; there may be a chance for NWI.

Originally published in my "Post-Tribune" column.

Money Wasted by NWI Mayors

NWI can’t make a case for keeping all casino cash

April 7, 2005

By Maurice M. Eisenstein
Post-Tribune guest columnist

Thirteen years ago, our mayors and state legislators promised the state of Indiana that, in exchange for gambling rights, they would turn Northwest Indiana into an economic miracle, benefitting the citizens of the area and generating new income and sales-tax revenues for the state.

The state agreed.

NWI receivednew tax revenues, jobs and contracts.

After more than $1.5 billion in casino-tax revenues over 10 years, what is our record?

Gary Mayor Scott King is incapable of managing a city that size. Evidence for this again surfaced recently when it became public that the leadership of the Gary Urban Enterprise Association spent more than $250,000 on personal items and bought property owned by directors outside of the GUEA zone.

King knew nothing of this. He was too busy giving out contracts to the trucking company owned by his campaign manager and making sure friends and family members were properly employed. On top of all that, he awards his “former” law firm a $600,000 contract with the city, and it was not the first.

In East Chicago, to help NWI with its gambling revenue utilization and East Chicago’s economic revitalization, we have the combined charlatans of Tom Cappas and Mike Pannos — one the midnight mayor and the other the former head of Indiana’s Democratic Party.

They first hijacked the East Chicago casino for themselves, then walked off with millions of dollars that rightly should have gone to the citizens by selling their shares in Showboat to Harrah’s.

They continued their abuse of East Chicago’s gambling privilege by setting themselves and their friends in casino-funded foundations with no reasonable oversight. In the end, with the help of the Robert Pastrick family’s complete lack of scruples, East Chicago is no better off than it was 10 years ago.

Now that Pastrick has moved on, Bobby Cantrell and Bob Stiglich have had to find a new family that fits the bill of immoral, incompetent and unscrupulous. They have found it in the McDermotts — the father and son of Hammond fame.

The father went from mayor of Hammond to president of the NWI Forum, and his only achievement was to get gambling into NWI. During this time, he also rose from newspaper vendor to making multi-million dollar deals on radio stations — go figure. We now find junior and senior are playing a flim-flam game with the people of NWI. Unbeknownst to anyone, senior is getting paid by a company that wants Woodmar Country Club.

Junior, acting innocently, with only a pure heart, threatens the club if they don’t sell. This is true gangsterism of the loan-shark variety.

None of this is for the sake of economic development (except the McDermotts’).

Anywhere else in the United States, it is a normal practice that public officials, if they are not to be thought of as crooks, thieves and charlatans, must ensure that any business relationship that could benefit them is kept at arm’s length.

The reality is that even after all the scrutiny by the governmental authorities, all the jail sentences and forced Greek vacations, all the forced economizing resulting from the property-tax restructuring, Democratic Party Chairman Stiglich and his minions continue to show that NWI cannot make a sustainable argument for continuing to have the gambling funds.

All that NWI has established over 10 years and $1.5 billion is the certainty that most of its political leaders are immoral, incompetent, incapable and occasionally criminal.

Maurice M. Eisenstein is a professor at Purdue University Calumet. Contact him at [email protected]

Indiana Higher Education a Disaster

Indiana falls to 46th nationally among residents with degrees The Associated Press March 28, 2005 INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana's ongoing efforts to boost the number of residents with college degrees hasn't prevented it from losing ground against other states, new U.S. Census Bureau figures show. An annual census survey released Monday shows that among the 50 states Indiana slid to 46th last year, down from 43rd in 2000, in terms of the percentage of residents 25 and older who have earned bachelor's or graduate degrees. In Indiana, 21.1 percent of Hoosiers 25 and older have earned a college degree. That's up almost 2 percentage points from the 2000 census, but below the record-high national average of 28 percent for the same age group. "We are gradually doing better, but not as well as other states are doing," said Stan Jones, Indiana's higher education commissioner. "Our college graduate production is continuing to go up. We're not keeping them in Indiana." Education experts and business leaders concerned about Indiana's continued "brain drain" note that higher education leads to higher pay. The new census report found that workers with bachelor's degrees earn, on average, $51,000 a year, compared with $28,000 for high school graduates. But the ramifications go beyond money because the nation's economy is increasingly dominated by jobs requiring highly skilled workers. And when a state can't supply them, companies look to expand operations elsewhere. At the same time, manufacturing jobs that dominated the economies of Midwestern states like Indiana no longer offer the same level of financial security. The problem has drawn closer attention from universities, businesses and community leaders in Indiana since the late 1990s, but significantly improving that statewide number is proving not to be easy. "It's not realistic to expect it to move huge amounts, 5 or 7 percentage points in a year," said William Sheldrake, president of the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. Indiana does better than most in sending young adults to college. Most Hoosiers who graduate from high school _ nearly 63 percent _ go on to college, which puts Indiana 10th in the country. However, barely more than one in two graduate within six years, and of those who do, about 20 percent a year leave Indiana for jobs in other states. State education officials said that amounts to about 10,000 of Indiana's roughly 50,000 public and private college graduates each year. However, Jones said the state's economy still is based heavily on manufacturing, and students need more high-paying jobs that will keep them in Indiana. ___ Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com

Purdue Calumet, Mayor Junior and Economic Development

It is now time for the President and the Board of Trustees to be held accountable for the lack of monetary and developmental commitment for higher education to NWI's economic development.  So far they have contributed little in significantly improving the financial status of either campuses Purdue Calumet or Purdue North Central.  Their main contribution is to increase the value of the Purdue Foundation's holdings in Crown Point by creating a huge mall.  The numbers in an earlier blog to this show that Purdue Calumet asked on its ultimate wish list for the lowest increase of any campus in Indiana.  This first means they have no plan as to how to develop in NWI.  Next year PUC will receive $10 million per year less than IUPU Fort Wayne.  Why?

Even by Purdue University's own definition of a high technology incubator, the thing being built in Crown Point with federal tax dollars does not fit what Purdue is advertising in West Lafayette.  Even the President of Purdue recognized that when he dedicated it by pointing out that it is too far from anywhere to be a technology incubator.

Mayor Junior, and his so claimed allies at Purdue University, should be able to deliver funding and development of a complete university to NWI.  But the actual data, in an earlier comment on this blog, shows that PUC did not even as for enough funds in its best wish list.  Its request was the lowest of all the campuses in Indiana; it will also receive the lowest amount of any campus in the State. 

For Junior and his staff of hangers on, like Jake, to claim they understand anything about economic development is an outright joke.  There is no doubt that McJunior is one of the most incapable politician and public servants to have set foot in NWI, but most especially in the arena of economic development.  It does not take a genius to realize that the $10 million NWI and Hammond are loosing every year is real development money.

Purdue and its Board of Trustees are selling PUC short.  They put in the smallest request for PUC's wish list of all the campuses in Indiana.  As a result they are going to get the smallest increase .5%.  There is no plan to develop a real university in NWI and to support economic development; quite the opposite.  Mammon Powers is the token NWI representation on the Board and he has not brought anything to the table in NWI in his whole life that was not handed to him as an exception. 

Don Powers was the last economic development visionary in NWI.  Junior is the opposite; an anti-visionary who can only look at micro problems.

If there was any real desire for economic development, than the Quality of Life Council would call them, Purdue, on the carpet for an explanation of why these funds are not flowing to NWI.  What the Quality of life Council is doing now in place of real development is useless. 

The bottom line is where is the money flowing and it is not here.  More studies and wishful thinking will not change that.

There is now the additional information that the administrators of higher education from Commissioner Stan Jones to the Presidents of the universities are a failure.  The data comes from the new report showing that Indiana has droped to number 46 from 43 of the fifty states during these peoples' tenure.  Indiana is now 46th in ranking of states in the number of people over 25 with bachelor's degrees.  It is pitiful how poorly these people are performing and collecting their paychecks.

By the way, Purdue's president is the highest paid in Indiana and Indiana's private funding is about fifth in the country.  So there are no excuses.

NWI Economic Development

NWI lacking the three keys for economic development

Feb. 24, 2005

By Maurice M. Eisenstein
Post-Tribune guest columnist

In a recent e-mail discussion with Gary Mayor Scott King, it was obvious that he is knowledgeable of the nuances of economic development. King discussed the three “T’s” theory — Technology, Talent and Tolerance — currently one of the world’s most accepted explanations for development in some areas, but not others including the cultural values needed to attract development to a geographical area. Retail businesses and bedroom communities are not economic development; only high technology can fit that need. Why then have King and NWI been unable to make significant strides during the past 15 years in attracting and keeping the “creative class”?

• Technology: Although technology is NWI’s best competitive advantage, it is the least unique and is easily reproduced by other localities. Even where there is some capital expended, it is to reproduce what others have, not to create new ideas. For creative technology, one needs only to look at Lafayette, Bloomington or Indianapolis where the state and the universities’ presidents have created cities — with NWI taxes — that are among the top 10 most attractive cities for development in the country.

In a moment of candor three weeks ago during the House Ways and Means Committee budgetary hearings, Purdue President Martin Jischke presented the future development of a technology research triangle between Lafayette, Bloomington and Indianapolis. Even though he was chastised by the NWI members of the committee for ignoring the northern part of the state, the reality of what he presented remains in place.

• Talent: We are not producing a ready pool of knowledgeable workers.

Technology companies will not come to a location where they have to attract qualified employees from outside. NWI’s ISTEP scores speak for themselves; they are a local human tragedy. The East Chicago and Hammond superintendents are charlatans and Gary needs to fire everyone and start over. In a business environment, the people in charge of these districts would have been fired years ago.

The other component of talent or “creative class” is higher education. In this capacity, NWI has been sold a bill of good for decades. The tax dollars from NWI have promoted the development of significant state universities in central Indiana, while NWI has gotten the crumbs. With the exception of Valparaiso, there is not a significant presence of higher education culture in the region.

In the 2005-2007 budgets, Purdue trustees requested the lowest increase for Purdue University Calumet of any state campus. The result in the first passage of the budget bill is a mere half a percent increase for PUC, the lowest in the state (Lafayette’s and Bloomington’s are 3 percent). It is also economic undevelopment — NWI dollars going to support other areas.

• Tolerance: This is tolerance of new ideas, not the usual platitudes about tolerance of different races and ethnicities. It is sufficient to see that tolerance is not part of our ongoing culture when “Dr.” Chester Dobis is our senior representative in Indianapolis. This man must go because he is out of touch with 21st century values. Legislators, such as Sen. Earline Rogers, who defended his Neanderthal message, should also resign because they lack recognition, which the “creative class” demands.

The three areas will be dealt with in my next three columns — with no holds barred, analyzing the problems, the villains and alternative solutions, including budget cuts. My purpose is to create change, not to create new friends.

Maurice M. Eisenstein is a professor at Purdue University Calumet. E-mail him at [email protected].

Hammond Mayor

It is now official, Hammond's Mayor, McJunior, and his ally in higher education has worked at undermining economic development for Hammond and NWI.  The new budget for Purdue University Calumet is the lowest in the State for any campus.

This is the result of the original request from PUC being the lowest request of any campus in the State.  This is the direct result of the Chancellor's attempt to keep the Campus at a no growth, no development, no improvement status.  There is no other explanation.

IUPU-Fort Wayne will be receiving in the next budget cycle $10 million per year more than PUC, that does not include additional money for them for the medical school and for building funds.  That money would have gone a long way if not completely ended the property tax problem.  Without it there is no economic development for NWI.

The only possible explanation, outside of benign neglect, is that there is a concerted plan from Lafayette not to allow this part of the State to compete effectively.  There work is succeeding.  As close as we are to Chicago; the last new development here was at the turn of the last century -- the steel mills.

Where is Mammon Powers?  Who is on the board of Trustees.  Why cannot we have a man with real intelligence in the job -- Don Powers. 

As best the can be said; except for the steel mills, there will be no development in the norther part of Lake County.  It is just not going to happen in anyone's current life time.  There is no real reason for it to occur now.

Thanks again Junior for a great job of developing Hammond.  My claim continues that Junior and his administration have no plan or knowledge for economic development. 

He is the emperor with no clothes and I am letting everyone know, not to fool themselves, he is naked.

NWI Economic Development

Finally after over ten years an event has occurred that actually puts NWI on the road to some economic development.  This has to do with sustainable and economically attractive development.

Forget about all the jokes you have heard about before that were somehow to get NWI onto some road of economic surge.  This is the home run perspective of economic development usually attempted by lazy politicians and their cronies that do not have any better idea.

The home run syndrome has to do with one major development, like a sport team, that will somehow energize the are to look attractive to those that won't come here.  This has not happened with all the money from gambling; it is not going to happen with the airport; and it is not going to happen from any development in transportation.  All of those may be good in and of themselves but they cannot do anything for this region. 

Further retail development and housing tracts is not economic development, it only creates a bedroom community.  The new "incubator" is not an incubator only a big shopping/office mall by another name.  There is no such thing as a "high-tech" incubator in the middle of nowhere away from a highly regarded university.

But finally there is a change -- ever so small but it is a beginning.  This change comes from the Indiana House of Representative Ways and Means Committee which has developed the first draft of the next two year budget for the State.  For once higher education in NWI did better than its "partners" in central Indiana.

There cannot be, as every study has shown, economic development without the central development of universities with superior quality and for this goal NWI has been short changed for over fifty years.  It may not have mattered fifty years ago; but, it has for the past twenty.  That is why we are at a stand still from which we cannot get out. 

But now we are moving thanks to two members of that committee who have finally come through for NWI: Representative Ayres and Representative Aguilera.  You can forget everything else you have heard about economic development this improvement of PUC, IUN, and PNC (among others around the State) is the best value we have ever developed for NWI and as a return on investment for the State coffers.

I will have the exact figures tomorrow.  But this bodes really well for the Region; we just need to keep it in the final bill.