Candidate Hackleman has been blogging about the current council making a profit off of the city, and that they should not be allowed to bid on city services. I actually agree with him....to a point. My father (councilman Van Vleet) is one of the fellas they are upset with, as he owns many companies here in Sidney. The city chose to do business with his companies, PO in hand they entered his establishment wanting to purchase, iron, flag, etc.
This looks bad for dad! But wait a minute....Did he bid? No. Did he make a profit?
No. City items were sold at or below cost. The rub would be: did he PROFIT?
No, he did not.
Don't get me wrong, we all get angry and go for the jugulars, (I am the worst at it)
But there comes a time when we need to take a step back and find out what we are really mad about, and what can we REALLY change. I get the most angry with my dad and the city. I am always asking WHY! It is super hard to learn that we can not change what is. That there are often underlying issues attached. When I am mad, and I want to see changes (city streets, city utilities, city employee benefits) Bob is the man who stands behind those depts. He stands behind his inability to speak of city employees.
As a conservative I find it hard to justify the massive spending this community has taken on in the last 5 years....then that gets thrown in my face that "you just want to see this community fail" or "you hate libraries and schools".
Here is the cold truth...I just hate my high taxes and high utility bills. I hate the holes in the street, I hate the crumbling curbs, I hate how much it cost to repair 1 block of road. I hate my city utility bills always going up and never going down. As a blond, I can not understand why those bills can't go down, after all, Cabela's has brought many new people to Sidney, (big house on the hill people)
so I feel like we have increased our tax payer base, and in the long run, utilities should have come down. But Noooooooooo. They get extra money in the coffers and the money goes out to needed vehicles. When, I ask you, will the money ever come back to us? When will they choose to NOT hire someone, NOT buy something and give back to us?
Now I know these are stupid questions, as my dad always gives me the "look", but this is my blog, and I just wonder why.
I never seem to like the answers to my questions.
I think I am an answer hater. OMG!
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
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My favorite is that the average real worker (people who go home dirty and exhausted) at Cabelas gets to give the City of Sidney 25% to 30% of their take home pay ! That is sick and wrong to ask 25% of someones wages to keep their lights on!!! What kind of sick un- christian f**k came up with that one, so we give the City 25%, Source Gas 15%, mortgage and or rent 50% , lets see that leaves 10%, or roughly 80 bucks to buy food, insurance, clothing, Doctors, pharmacist,vehical tax, vehical fuel, vehical maintainance, never mind the fun stuff like cable TV, internet , phone service. Who the f&^k decides that its ok to pay that little and to charge that much, OH Yeah, people who already have theirs. And now they want a Cabela Employee ( a clean refreshed one) to be a part of the council, so they can have paths to their door, and employees that are slaves to their City of Sidney Bills. They can then continue with their back room wage freeze deals so they can continue to pay their real workers so little and their clean employees so much. When the french drug out the guillotine it was for a reason, the rich refused to acknowledge the poor in any way shape or form, Its happened again and we are again beginning to build guillotines to defend ourselves,only the French made a couple of mistakes, they did not kill enough of the elites family members, to take a page from Machiavelli, one must eliminate the entire line, down to infant 4th cousins to remove their scourge from this earth.( this technique will also help us with the Muslims, who pose a slightly lesser danger to us than the greedy rich)If we don't their greedy children will simply carry on for the greedy parents. Eliminating these greedy bast@$ds from our country will insure the workers survival, its them or us and its been them for way too long. And there are WAY more of us then them. The Scarlet Pimpernell will be of no use to them this time. Extreme you ask? NO, its a matter of survival at this point. Them or Us that simple. They have had a decade or more to observe our plight without 1 single nod of acknowledgement of suffering. So they are either blind or evil, either way we can no longer pay for the dream that they get to live.
ReplyDeleteI must agree. They don't see the poor anymore.
ReplyDelete(note post from true northie, it does not exist) The sad thing, the Cabela's claim to be catholic. No doubt they once were. But now that it is no longer in their hands, they have wandered into the greed zone. Getting rich off a slaves back is pure greed. To them the only suffering in this town is the fatties who need a path and a fishing pond. Maybe they are falling back on the old "teach a man to fish".....The gap between the worker bee and the queen bee has widened. Safari Time!
I think the part that stings most is the fact that the meritocracy our founding fathers fought so hard for , starting with the bastard child Alexander Hamilton, has been pissed away for nepotism, meaning that no matter how worthless the child of a rich f**k is he will be promoted over a poor qualified applicant. We fought a war over just that. And the smarmy basta@#s figured out how to get the old system of Queens, Kings, Earls Dukes etc. back. So here we go again, VIVA LA REVOLUTION !!
ReplyDeleteMust get more stuffed dead animals, must kill..giraffe....must kill more....load my gun slave! Momma needs a new statue, lay off a few in distribution. Need to refuel the jet.
ReplyDeleteSafari time! Someone is gonna get a tapeworm.
God is funny that way.
When will these rich out of touch idiots realize that they are going to pay either in Taxes or Wages, It would behoove them to pay the wages, but they refuse so our only recourse is Taxes, Do they honestly think they get to keep it all to themselves?
ReplyDeleteWe need to develope a pee test to test for alcohol. POP QUIZ!!!!
ReplyDeleteBehoove! Watch out they will shoot anything with a hoof.
ReplyDeleteThey have a test that can tell within 10 hours how much alcohol you have in your system, Marijuana stays for 6 months up to 2 years, so kids don't smoke the harmless natural weed and instead suck the freon out of the airconditioners to avoid being caught by pee testing. Good Call .
ReplyDeleteAre you referring to having to be an alcoholic to further your career at Cabelas? I think they have other ways of telling if your executive material, first they offer to swap wives, if you say yes your in, then they ask you if you wan't to go get drunk instead of going home to your family, if you say yes your in, then they ask if you want to go on safari kill a bunch of innocent non edible animals stuff them and hang them on your walls , if you say yes your in. So they have their ways of weeding out the family values people and replacing them with the money values people.
Everytime they open a new store, someone here gets layed off. I believe they are blinded by all that shiny stuff. And at what cost? To grow so big that you don't know who or how many you squish. I would never want to be that big. I think a soul got sold.
ReplyDeleteOur Jaycees can't have a meeting without booze either, but that's ok since they do so much good for our town.
ReplyDeleteGeeze, what are they thinking! If cabelas executives take over our city council there will be no one to look after the citizens, there will be dead animals all over the court house walls, we will need to open at least 3 more bars, 2 more welfare offices, close 4 churches,we will need at least 1 abortion clinic for sure ( can't have babies with 90% of take home pay going to utilities ) and the commodity distribution points will have to triple at least, Its not looking good for the working poor here is it.
ReplyDeleteOh the boozers get a clean ride everytime! Put Put bar Crawl..are you serious...what message does that send...hey wait maybe that was "executive training"...is that tax deductible?
ReplyDeleteBut it's going to the betterment of the community, so it's OK.
ReplyDeletecabelas has dalan hiatt mark neinuhuers tamara nelsens husband and tim hackleman. it is unlikely that gaston or hiatt will be rmoved so you got a 2 in 9 chance to pick up another cabela clone
ReplyDeleteOh, hello anonymous, forgive our harshness, we are trolling for Harpie Krunts today, and have yet to catch one. Maybe we will snag a real big one with our tirades.
ReplyDeleteI hope any way...here harpie harpie...I've put more than enough meat on our hook....here harpie harpie...
ReplyDeleteKelly,
ReplyDeleteYou are right, and you are wrong on the tax payer issue. Sidney's population has only gained a few hundred since 1978. The census may show about 66-6750ish residents. Most of the growth has been in the valuation increases for property. It is true that total tax dollars have gone up in Cheyenne County every year since 1999 (except 2003). At the margin (the amount of taxes the next resident would pay), the rate is very high, compared to living outside a city or town, or even living in Colorado. I liken the tax problem in Sidney to the Medicare "Doughnut hole": We have grown to the point that, without more people, we can not spread the tax base out (thereby lowering the average tax rate), but the rate we currently charge for necessity items like housing taxes, personal property, utilities is keeping people from moving here.
Sidney has grown and they have benefited primarily from Cabela's continued belief that the town is where they want to be. It would be foolish of them not to try to influence things in their behavior, but it isn't particularly sinister. All corporations do it. It just appears that way when they are the big fish in a small town.
The key to solving the problem is to get employers here who will relocate existing employees to the area. Emagine concepts is doing just that, along with creating at least 20 new jobs for people who live here.
Sidney's problem is two fold. There are those who want big city services and who don't mind paying for them, but there are a larger number of people who cannot afford the rates (even though they are under the cap by a good margin), have lost jobs or know people who have lost jobs. We need the kind of economic job growth that brings people to town to diversify the tax base, but we also need the kind of growth that increases the sales tax revenues in order to get out from under the spectre of LB775 and Nebraskadvantage tax refund payments.
Frankly, I don't know how either of those will be solved to the extent we will see taxes decline significantly, but Emagine Concepts, as well as the stuff Ron Carlson at Commercial Resins is doing is the right direction.
Note to self... behavior=favor... as in their favor.
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post! But now I gotta yell.
A FEW HUNDRED SINCE 1978!!!! Are you kidding me? We hustled out a bunch of non tax payers, (the poorman shuffle, many left the Northside housing for the old college 10 miles east of us) and then a bunch of highly paid tax paying implants came in, (we know this because of the high priced housing boom) and our tax base did not increase? How can this be? I just don't get it. Feeling awfully blonde today.
Who is emagine concept and what do they do?
Emagine concepts is a company that makes CNC or computer aided manufacture of doors and other mill work projects. They are moving into the adams area to the west of here and have some designs on starting a green energy project that would add additional jobs. It is frankly the kind of development we need to go after.
ReplyDeleteYessss! I know plenty of good hard workers who could use a job. We must welcome Emagine C!
ReplyDelete(imagine/see) tee hee!