This quarter-finished mall is the perfect example, perfect, of exactly how not to build a city. Spend all your effort and capital to attract suburban development, strip retail development and a mall whose tenants who couldn't give a rat's ass about the community, and then pin your city down by a heroin-like dependence on retail sales taxes ...and of those retail sales, make 30% based on automobile sales. Further pin future retail sales on a mall that ain't gonna get built.
At one point late in 2008, I was seemingly impressed how Elk Grove, relative to Sacramento County, to the State, to the Nation, didn't carry nearly as much debt as every other level of government. I was wrong. From our latest city budget 5-year forecast, we are expecting to carry an annual $4,000,000 deficit going forward...assuming things don't get worse and things improve by 2012 -- both rather bold assumptions, wouldn't you say?
That Elk Grove (or any government, for that matter) didn't plan for a contingency for even the most mildest of recessions is amazing. But you know, our government only mirrors its constituents, all of whom also failed to plan for any possible loss-of-growth. My neighbor's friend, a florist-turned-real estate saleslady, never assumed her $15,000 per month in commissions in 2004 was going to dry up...repossessed was her beautiful, beautiful Mercedes, and repossessed was her beautiful, beautiful 3,800 sq ft Elk Grove starter mansion.
We got what was brung to us.
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