This is just the start. The LCCCA has yet to pay back dollar #1 of PRINCIPAL. The real day of reckoning comes in the next 12 months with a major payment due right around this time next year.
The $85,000 shortfall Kevin Molloy scoffs at today will be chump change when the chickens really do come home.
All of this nonsense over the tax revenues and Smith Travel and the County Treasurer are just part 2 of the LNP smear campaign. With [Dick]Shellenberger and [Molly] Henderson dispatched,[Craig] Ebersole is now in the crosshairs. Why? He actually had the gall to suggest there would not be enough money? What nerve! Who does he think he is?
Where are our County Commissioners in this?????????????????????
Don’t they have a fiscal responsibility to their taxpaying constituents, including the hotel industry? Are they too afraid to take on the Power Elite”?
Why are they being so quiet?????
SOMEBODY has to take the bull by the horns and put an end to this fiscal White Elephant before it puts an end to us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gil Smart, in his appeal to the state open records office, calls into question the actions of the County Treasurer in his tax collection and auditing procedures. Since the County guaranteed the bonds that are supported by the tax, what motivation would a County official have to fail to collect every dollar possible when they will get stuck with the shortfall? And I used to think that Gil Smart may have been one of the few at LNP with half a brain.
Actually, the LCCCA did make its first principal payment. When they did not have the funds for the next payment in the fall of 2011, it forced the authority into a complex refinancing agreement with Wells Fargo.
Note that it is NOT the LCCCA which is taking the additional “hotel tax”, it is the trustee of the bonds, M&T Bank.