Laughable: City Council Member Wants to Reclassify Alerus Maintenance Bills As Improvements
Boy, things are getting worse and worse:
Recently, city leaders have talked about a write-off of $872,000 that City Hall had transferred to the city-owned events center for its operations. City officials expected payback from the ¾-percent sales tax dedicated to the Alerus Center.
The city charter, however, does not mention operations as a permissible use of the sales tax, which City Attorney Howard Swanson has interpreted to mean it is not permitted.
Christensen, an attorney himself, said he thinks it would, however, permit maintenance, which now is in the operations budget. If that’s the case, he said, the center could repay any of the $872,000 used for maintenance.
Wow, I wish I could have gotten this out earlier because the meeting where he’s going to be talking about it is starting as I’m typing this post.
This has got to be the screwiest idea I’ve heard. Mr. Christensen want’s to pull a bit of Enron accounting and reclassify some operating expenses as “Infrastructure Improvements” so that they can subsidize the failed Alerus Center out of another revenue stream.
Of course they already have a subsidy from the 1/4 per cent restaurant and hotel tax. That raises something over $300,000 which ought to be all the subsidy that they need. The problem with these guys is that they don’t want to fix the management issues. They just want to charge the people of the area MORE and MORE money.
It’s pretty evident to me that no amount of money that’s sunk in that place is going to be enough. They’ll always want more. What’s more we can’t trust the city council and the Alerus commission to be honest with us. They have been considering the entertainment tax proceeds to be “operating income” rather than a subsidy. That’s so they could report a smaller loss to cover up how poorly the center is being run.
One can only conclude from the idea that Mr. Christensen floated that he doesn’t think the Alerus can be expected to pay for cleaning it’s carpets, or sweeping up the lobby, or changing a lightbulb. All of those are regular maintenance chores that he wants the taxpayers to subsidize.
The city also more or less hid the fact that they had loaned $872,000 to the Alerus. Even the city council is claiming that they weren’t in the dark (I don’t really believe them). But regardless you can hardly claim they were open about that. In fact that wasn’t reported until Say Anything published it last month.
We also broke the story on how the concert fund was depleted this year. That “concert fund” of course is a fiction created by the city council to cover up any losses the Alerus has bringing in Concerts.
Finally we have to wonder why the management company hasn’t released the financial statements. Is there something else we should know?
