Say Anything Blog

With so many restrictions in place, Council President Hal Gershman considered using the sales tax surplus to build an endowment for the Alerus Center, a fund that earns enough interest to pay for building improvements long past 2029.

The question is how large would such an endowment need to be?

In 2009, Alerus Center officials want to spend $4.7 million as part of a major upgrade, which they’ve said ought to take place every seven or eight years. That’s about $600,000 a year that the endowment needs to raise in interest.

The Alerus has been getting a subsidy of over $300,000 year from the Entertainment (meals and hotels)) tax.  Add that to this new subsidy and you wind up with a million dollars. 

The voters of Grand Forks narrowly approved a 57 million dollar events center.  It wound up costing over 80 million.  Now all of a sudden the Alerus gang have decided that every seven or eight years.  And they figure since they want it it’s up to the taxpayers to provide. 

Well excuse me, but I disagree.  We built your events center.  If you want to upgrade it you should run it like a business so that you can afford to do the upgrades out of profits.  Instead these guys think that they’re entitled to our money for as long as they want.

This Alerus center has been the most dishonest as it could be.  And this article just exposes that all to heck.  The voters approved a sales tax to build the events center.  The city council (including Terry Bjerke I’m sad to say) was doing their best to stab the voters in the back and use that sales tax money for other operations.  I know that Bjerke wants to lower property taxes but you do that by cutting expenditures, not by finding another bunch of money to spend.  We have a sales tax that supposedly went for “property tax relief.”  Who’s property taxes went down.  They just used it to have more money to spend.

Forturnately much as they’ve tried the city council couldn’t find a way around the home rule charter nor the bond covenants.  But if you read the article I’m pretty sure that they feel that their commitment to the bondholders a lot more serious than their commitment to the citizens of Grand Forks. 

When the city sold $71 million worth of bonds in 1997, it promised investors that all the money would go toward the Alerus Center debt or building improvements, said Brenda Krueger with Springsted. Without that promise, called a covenant, she said, the city would’ve had to pay a higher interest rate.

The city also is restricted because when voters approved the measure that enacted the three-quarter percent sales tax, the language required the money be spent only on an events center. Another public vote would be needed to change that.

Shame on you guys.  You need to fix your over spending problem, not screw the taxpayers in another way.