Day: August 15, 2016

To the Editor: Municipal Donations to Non-profits

To The Editor:

It is Budget preparation time again for our public officials. While we appreciate the effort they put into managing our tax dollars, we would like to make a couple of suggestions since all are working with tight budgets and face many needs to be met for their communities.

  1. As always, public officials are solicited by “non-profit” organizations for donations of public money to help meet their needs. When considering your contribution of our tax dollars to these groups, please make every effort to determine if there is anyone on their staff or in their organization that is paid more than your entity’s highest paid employee or elected official. If so, the answer has to be “no.” If a “non-profit” can out compensate the entity they are soliciting, they do no qualify for public assistance.
  2. If you have outstanding accounts payable that cannot be resolved in the current fiscal year, and have to be carried over as expenses to the next, please do not use our tax dollars for anything other than our immediate financial obligations.

We appreciate the work of non profits and belong to several ourselves. However, we do feel there are other avenues of approach to meet their financial needs such as fund raisers and raising membership dues.

Lana Noonan, Chairman
Ron Thorp, Co-Chairman
Hancock County Alliance for Good Government

What I see is an elected official in deep denial: How much is a money losing community hospital worth?

And how much federal tax money will have been pissed away on construction that will never fetch more than 20 cents on the dollar in the real estate market.

Lafontaine: Selling hospital is ‘not viable’ ~ Dwayne Bremer

Last month, a consultant told the Hancock County Hospital Board that he believed HMC was worth between $14 million to $22 million.

Hancock County Board of Supervisors President Blaine Lafontaine said Friday that he believes that number is “very low.”

According to Lafontaine, HMC received much more than $22 million from the federal government to rebuild the hospital.

“I don’t have the exact figures, but it could be between $80 million to $100 million,” Lafontaine said. “Selling the hospital is not a viable option at this time. Our conversation needs to be on how to enhance the hospital.”

The truth is $14 million may be too high when you factor in the consistency of the 15% operating losses which can’t be sustained unless one subscribes to the Mayor Fillingame theory of economics. Further, any valuation that is a function of earnings or cash flow indicate a money losing business is worth exactly zero. Worse is the fact the supervisors are fooling themselves thinking the problem can be solved by growing the population of the county. Continue reading “What I see is an elected official in deep denial: How much is a money losing community hospital worth?”