The golfers who frequent the village-owned FoxTail Golf club want a brick and mortar clubhouse in the worst way.
Having make do with doublewide trailers isn’t good enough.
How does the Village Board plan to finance the proposed $1.8 milliion building?
$599,143 has been squirreled away in development impace fees since the Village stopped turning over such money to the Crystal Lake Park District.
What about the rest?
Alternative revenue bonds are suggestred in the memo for consideration at Tuesday’s Zoom meeting.
Not regular revenue bonds that would be repaid from revenue from the golf course, but bonds that would be backed by the full faith and credit of the Village of Lakewood.
In other words, real estate taxes.
I’m guessing that no one on the current Board owned a home in Lakewood after the early 1990’s Board voted to finance the purchase of the Lskewood Golf Club from Plote Builders with alternative revenue bonds.
Three of us attended the meeting when that financing was being discussed.
A former Village Trustee Roger Reid, Jim Bishop and I spoke.
Reid said that he didn’t think village government should be competing with private enterprise by being in the golf club business.
Bishop pointed out that golf courses throughout the area were in financial troubles and wondered why Lakewood would want to enter such a business.
I asked, “Is this ever going to cost me a dime?”
I was assured it would not.
Silly me.
I beleved my friends and neighbors.
Here’s the problem then and now:
Alternative revenue bonds are ones ostensibly to be repaid by identified sources of revenue, for example, greens fees, miscellaneous income from the clubhouse and, it seems, developer impact fees.
But, just in case, don’t you know, the bonds will have to be repaid by property taxes if the projected revenues from the other non-real estate sources don’t bring in enough money.
Over the tweny years of the original bonds, in most years there was insufficient golf club revenue.
Our property tax bill was hiked $500 many years to pay off the golf club bonds.
I wasn’t given an ownership interest.
The Board did not give me a number of free rounds I could have used or sold.
It just collected the money resulting from long-gone Board members and paid off the alternative revenue bonds that the shifty bond salesman convinced them to issue to save a bit of interest.
As the Chiasgo Tribune wrote about alternative revenue bonds on January 4, 2013:
- The catch for towns: They must be able to foresee paying off the loans without raising property taxes.
- The catch for residents: If towns’ projections are wrong, taxes are automatically hiked to make the loan payments.
My hope is that my Village Board will not succomb to the lure of a borrowing technique that could cost all Lakewood property owners over the life of the bonds.
Maybe Lakewood should summons Glinda the good witch of the North, you could click your heels three times and the clubhouse will magically fix itself.
Marengo says the times of Lakewood putting off what can be done today are over.
Follow the $$$&&$$.
When Paul Swerwatka ran that town, he cleaned up the corruption.
Now that he’s gone, the corruption skyrockets!
It’s only taxpayer money – more where that came from.
Set up some kind of fund whereby “golfers” who go to this place contribute $1,800 each to the fund for the brick building that THEY will use.
When 1,000 golfers have each contributed their fair share of $1,800, then start the building project.
The amount of $1,800 is peanuts these days.
Guys who arrive there to golf driving luxury cars should be asked to give more than $1,800 each and then the brick building project can begin earlier.
The foyer in the brick building will then have a large bronze plaque listing the names of all of the contributors.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/77/11/38/7711380322c19000114de462c34c261e.jpg
HonestAbe1 has it right.
The catch for residents: If towns’ projections are wrong, taxes are automatically hiked to make the loan payments.
Projections made by politicians are probably 90% wrong
Redtail would have more money to work with if Stephan and Smith hadn’t wasted over $200k on renovations without investigating the structural integrity of the current building.
Smith told the Board the trailers would last another 10 years if we fixed the roof.
This is so disgusting.
Almost as disgusting as Hetermann’s scheme to buy Chapel Hill GC on the Johnsburg taxpayer’s dine so he can hold court with his minions in the clubhouse and prattle on about how government is great and Bob Anderson is a nut .
Just don’t rile Еd up like Scott Letzter did, causing a discharge of a colostomy bag.
Ed really stunk up the joint.