Here are a few things I learned from it this time:
Quoted from Manufacturing Briefs:
Wonder facility stays open
Interstate Bakery Corp., parent company of the Wonder Bread facility in Davenport that closed in November, have announced plans to keep the facility indefinitely and use it for distribution and administrative operations.
The company initially planned to sell the facility and find a smaller location to run its limited operations.
Obviously this doesn't mean the bakery is staying, but just that they'll be using the building as a warehouse and distribution center instead of adding another vacant hulk to Davenport.
Arsenal to relocate 300 jobs
The Arsenal Island-based Defense Finance and Accounting Service will be sent to three undisclosed locations this month as part of a realignment approved by the nine-member Base Closure and Realignment Commission, or BRAC.
About 300 jobs are expected to be transferred to Columbus, Ohio; Rome, N.Y.; and Indianapolis.
Nothing but bad news there. The longer they had waited to move jobs the more people could have taken early retirement and maybe stayed in the QC.
Quoted from Economic Briefs:
Apartments built downtown
McDonnell & Associates Rental Properties, a Quad-City developer, soon will complete wall-to-wall renovations of the five-story apartment building at 321 E. 7th St. in downtown Davenport.
The City View building will have 36 apartments with views of the downtown and Mississippi River. Model units are expected to be open early this month.
So the Courtland is reopening. I don't know if I consider it downtown, but I could see how they'd rather be associated with downtown progress rather than 10th and Iowa crime district. I had originally heard that these were going to be condos, so I'm curious what else they changed their minds on. I hope to stop in and tour and photograph these apartments when they get finished. I truly hope they succeed, because this could be something that reaches out from the warehouse district to tie into the surrounding community.
8 comments:
How many times has the old Courtland apartments been renovated? Seems like they were only occupied for a short time, and remodeled once or twice after they were vacant. Is this a case of someone using tax incentives again or are these developers using their monies?
Ah the Courtland. The City shut the place down and made it go bankrupt (even though progress was being made and an engineer's report said it was habbitable and needed less than $100,000.00 in repairs). That little fiasco cost the taxpayers to lose 1.5 million dollars that the City had lent to the owners in second mortgage money. You see, when there is a foreclosure, all second mortgages get wiped out. The City forced the foreclosure by shutting the place down and making the owners go bankrupt. End result? The guy that bought the place paid only $341,000.00 for it at forelcosure sale and sold it a year later without doing too much to it for 1.3 million dollars. Nice pay day for him. Nice bath for the taxpayers.
The Courtland has some history and is the single reason why instead of Dee's department being audited, let's start with Clayton's department. The community economic development department is to blame and wasted millions of our money on the project. Guess who was there with their hands out - you bet ya - none other then Ms. Ridge from JLCS. Do you think anyone was willing to ask why a homeless not for profit was accepting federal money from the city to act as a general contractor? That project was a tax credit project too. Wasted. The fact of the matter is that there is little accountability here in Davenport - the city administrator doesn't seem to have a grip in the departments and staff. We waste tons and tons of money either directly or indirectly. Had the city handled the courtland appropriately, it would have saved us a lot of dollars and helped an entire neighborhood. The city ignored the pleas for help from the neighbors who begged for help with the issues at the building. The city is directly to blame for the crime generated at the building. In Davenport, we seem to make excuses for poor people acting badly. Just because you are poor, doesn't give you the right to be criminal. The city doesn't seem to get that.
There is a wealth of information at the library basement and from city staff about issues related to how we spent the federal housing dollars and how we monitor them. Non-compliance galore and we don't hold anyone accountable.
I laugh when I think that the city is called a Municipal Corporation. It sure isn't run like one. We are so lazy. We never hold the right people accountable for their actions and we make excuse after excuse. Gosh.
I was really hoping that Wonderbread would get a location that they could park their trucks without using the PUBLIC road. It never fails when I am late for a meeting one of their stupid trucks is trying to back in or pull out of their postage stamp of a parking lot. I wonder if the city has ever given them tickets for blocking traffic or charged them for the extra wear and tear they cause to the road surface moving their rigs around down there. Probably not. Its Davenport.
There is only one person to blame for the Courtland Apartments, and it's not Clayton Lloyd.
Thom Hart is responcible. No one else. It was Thom Hart that pushed this deal, and city staff followed the councils direction.
When the owner got into serious financial trouble, it was the council that decided to loan more money (I think that decision goes back to Pat Gibbs, maybe the Yerrington/Carroll council).
But yah, blame staff. Maybe we should blame the uneducated voters that put these dorks in office. You get what ya vote for.....
Of course it is us all who are to balme, but when you have staff who never turn over and who are involved to give advice and guidance to the council, of course they are to blame. Check and see for yourself if they actually do their jobs for us. You have politically uneducated alderman who believe every word spoken to them by staff. No wonder we are in such a pickle.
There was an engineer's report that the building was quite habitable, and although it needed some repairs it did not need major repairs. The owner, partnership for affordable housing, was trying to make the City happy and was doing everything they asked for. Still, Mike Farris (from the rental housing inspection department) decided to vacate the building. That in turn threw the building into foreclosure (because no income = foreclosure). That wiped out the taxpayer's 1.5 million second mortgage loan.
Maybe Hart should not have gotten us in that mess in the first place, so he opened a wound. The staff turned that wound into a bleeding hemorrhage that has cost us all a lot of money.
There we go, why is affordable housing always associate with bad behavior? Why can't we get it right?Poor people deserve a crime free neighborhood too and government just makes standards low in this regard - always here in Davenport. The term 'affordable' equals 'slum' in Davenport. We need a philosophy change. Everyone needs affordable housing, but the kind we provide in Davenport is always of the lower standard.
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