Why is nothing spelled out?

It is all pretty vague.

Who is this gun seller?

I can’t find anything anywhere on what this woman actually stands for (besides killing human babies).

She is endorsed by every cook in the state, yet we know nothing about her (except that she likes to attack).

Seeing lies propagated as political reality by Lying Nancy puts me in mind of one of my favorite stories.

All ya’all knew you weren’t getting away without a joke ….. well Nancy’s a joke so this will make two:

A Harley Biker is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion’s cage.

Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the collar of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.

The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain, the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings the girl to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.

A reporter has watched the whole event.

The reporter addressing the Harley rider says, ‘Sir, this was the most gallant and bravest thing I’ve seen a man do in my whole life.’

The Harley rider replies, ‘Why, it was nothing, really. The lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right.’

The reporter says, ‘Well, I’ll make sure this won’t go unnoticed. I’m a journalist, you know, and tomorrow’s paper will have this story on the front page. So, what do you do for a living, and what political affiliation do you have?’

The biker replies “I’m a U.S. Marine, and a Republican.”

The journalist leaves.

The following morning the biker buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:

U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH!!!

The Press lies and the Democrats are paying for it.

I would say, “Semper Fi” to Fierabras, but it is not mine to say.

Only someone who has actually earned that can use that saying.

That would be my husband; and he is not into making friends on the internet like I am.

Cindy, I’m just curious who does qualify to “tell you how to live your life” as you put it.

Because her opponent is a marketing guy for a manufacturer who has an Associates degree from Elgin Community College even though he grew up in Crystal Lake.

So…. we will forgo the fact they are running to represent you in government not tell you how to live… you d plenty of that on this blog.

God, vaffan.

Also… here is Skillicorn’s $5.5M giveaway to a gun store:

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120702/business/707039888/

A TIF monetary grant to a,privately owned business chosen without public right of input is exactly a giveaway.

It is a giveaway of private individual citizen homeowners’ property tax dollars to a private individual at the whim of a few politicians without substantive scrutiny oversight or recourse in the case of provable misfeasance.

Villages collecting sales tax do not fund schools.
Property taxes fund schools.

TIFs take property tax dollars, and convert them into Illage owned dollars.

TIFs are conversion mechanisms: to convert public property tax dollars into privately directed tax dollars of municipal government.

TIF District finance is the poster child for the Illinois Legislative Industry refusing to do business with individual citizens, while maintaining a robust trade for benefit of elite insiders.

( By the way, how much of the lucky recipient businesses are abated sales taxes in addition to the millions in free land and ourptright grants? Car dealerships often receive all sales tax revenue).

alabama?

When we fail to exercise our choice – to think or not to think – we become our own oppressors.

Two inappropriate labels when stating a TIF is an Allen Skillicorn giveaway.

Allen Skillicorn is one member of the East Dundee Village Board which as a board votes on measures.

The Village Board consists of 6 elected Trustees and 1 elected Village President.

Thus apparently Allen Skillicorn voted in favor of issuing TIF bonds to finance expansion of GAT Guns.

Would have to dig to see when that vote occurred.

It would be helpful if Nancy Zettler and her campaign backed up their label with more details.

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East Dundee as just about every municipality in Illinois can do a better job at making TIFs more transparent.

For example, a spreadsheet listing each parcel, identifying its TIF District, property tax payments by year for say 10 years, incentives, and proposed incentives.

Not all TIF measures are bad for taxpayers.

For example, would GAT have expanded were the incentive not offered?

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Rather than advocating for better TIF transparency and providing more details about the GAT TIF bond, Nancy Zettler and her supporters choose to label the TIF as a giveaway.

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Transparency:

East Dundee does not seem to videotape its board meetings.

It does post a board agenda packet for meetings containing the documents to be discussed in the meeting (how many days prior to the meeting is it posted?).

It has a special section of the website that lists ordinances and resolutions passed by year (which apparently was used as the source to post the laundry list of Allen Skillicorn votes on economic incentives).

alabama?

Did you miss all the internet outages on Friday?

(The original date that the elections were going to be posponed.)

Hence the Monday announcement.

Constitution states January 3rd.

Can’t help you, if you can’t find information.

IT would make a greater impact if an example using dollars was included rather than only using percentages.

**TIFs are bad for taxpayers, which is probably why I’ve never seen Skillicorn vote “yes” on one…**

Then you haven’t been paying attention.

Skillicorn himself has admitted – in public – to voting for TIFs.

But Cindy, keep up. you said that election postponement was going to happen two days ago. But it DID NOT HAPPEN.

So when IS it going to happen?

Joe- my point was that Cindy stated a person with a Graduate degree- a JD wasn’t qualified-

I was just pointing out that someone who had an associates degree was no more qualified.

And frankly Joe- it tells me that he likely went to school as an adult.

Because he lives in the ECC district now.

Frankly- I don’t care-

I believe you get a great education at a community college – (unlike most of the people on this blog who habitually criticize MCC having clearly never been inside the school in at least a decade.)

f being an attorney doesn’t qualify her- how does marketing for a manufacturer?

It is fascinating to see the same people flip flop depending on whether they like the person.

This of course is when Cindy will tell me I am an idiot (for using simple logic) and then tell me I am not God Fearing because I don’t agree with her.

Just pointing out the obvious flaws in her logic.

Just Like Mark will say how Walkup is a tax fighter because he voted ( as one out of 24 for) for something on the board but now says to say Alan can be held responsible isn’t accurate because he is one of six.

Just keep the rules consistent.

The Nancy Zettler flyer above states:

“He has voted over 50 times to give away our tax dollars to corporations.”

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Here is the URL to the list of 50 “give aways” to “corporations.”

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Y1kjG9iGLAOG5rWE56aW0yZVU/view

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The URL was obtained from the Nancy Zettler website.

Why it is a Google Drive URL instead of a Zettler campaign website URL is unknown.

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Following is one of the 50 “give aways” to “corporation” from that list.

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Ordinance 12-48 – Appr Annex 14N837 Known as Pampered Pets into East Dundee

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So exactly what is the give away?

She could be more specific?

What is the dollar amount, or estimated dollar amount?

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Here are all the companies on that list.

Apparently Nancy Zettler is against whatever incentives these companies received.

Generally, such incentives are an offset against anticipated revenue that is expected to be derived.

The idea being, if the incentive were not offered, the revenue would not materialize.

She chooses to label incentives as giveaways, as if the revenue to the village would materialize if the incentive was not offered.

Each TIF incentive should be evaluated individually in detail, and we are missing a lot of detail to label all 50 giveaways.

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– Prairie Materials area

– 501 – 505 Dundee Avenue, East Dundee

– 185 Penny Avenue, East Dundee

– Route 25 Redevelopment Project Area

– 207 Barrington Avenue, East Dundee

– Otto Engineering, East Dundee

– 185 Penny Avenue, East Dundee

– 455 East Main Street, East Dundee

– 100 – 102 North River Street, East Dundee

– SV LLC, East Dundee

– Downtown District, East Dundee

– C.A.K.E., East Dundee

– Bandito Barney’s, East Dundee

– 611 East Main Street, East Dundee

– Pampered Pets Services Resorts and Spa, 14 N 837, East Dundee

– Insurance Auto Auctions, East Dundee

– Al Piemonte, East Dundee

– Cook County TIF

– South Route 25 TIF

– Route 25 South Redevelopment Project Area ($7M Bonds)

– GAT Properties, 14 N 915 Rt 25, East Dundee

– Cook County Redevelopment Project Area

– 14 N 808 IL Route 25, East Dundee (Craig Bakstad)

– 14 N 679 East Dundee (Buettner Property)

– Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation

– Made to Measure, East Dundee

– CJB, East Dundee

– Route 68 West TIF, East Dundee

– 7 Hills Healthcare Center PC, East Dundee

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Some properties are listed multiple times.

Apparently they received multiple incentives.

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We need better TIF transparency.

For a political campaign to simply copy and past the ordinances and resolutions from the village website to a document without providing more context and then labeling them all as tax giveaways is misleading.

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VOED in the link = Village of East Dundee

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Enjoy all your giveaways above organizations.

Nancy Zettler thinks they were all giveaways.

Freebies.

Gifts.

The insinuation being you don’t deserve it.

A textbook case of disinformation and spin.

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Any regular reader of the blog knows perfectly well the problems with public sector pensions in this state.

It has been repeated hundreds of times.

Here we go again.

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One pension sentence was added to the Illinois State constitution in 1970.

Prior to that, the state constitution did not mention pensions.

The sentence was allegedly added because politicians were not fully funding pensions.

But there was an ulterior motive that quickly became apparent in 1971.

How do we know this.

Starting 1971, pension benefits were regularly hiked.

Now if the goal was to fully fund pensions, then no benefits would have been hiked until pensions were fully funded.

But that was not the goal.

The goal was to maximize current pay as well as pension payout.

In other words, the goal was to have your cake (salary hikes) and eat it too (pension benefit hikes).

—–

The pension sentence was part of a re-written constitution that was the result of the 1970 Constitutional Convention.

As a side note, Michael Madigan was an elected delegate at the 1970 Constitutional Convention for his district, first elected as State Representative in 1970, taking office in 1971.

A special election was held on December 15, 1970 for the specific and only purpose to vote on the re-written constitution.

The voters approved the re-written constitution at that election.

Partially due to the fact there were many changes to the constitution, the pension sentence was not properly vetted.

Here is the sentence.

“Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”

What are the problems with the sentence?

Pension benefits can be hiked,

irregardless if pensions are already underfunded.

An underfunded pension means taxpayers owe money to the pension fund…aka taxpayer IOU to the pension fund.

So think about that for a second.

That is akin to charging your credit card, when you are carrying a balance month to month.

What would have been another approach?

To first fully fund pensions, then, if there is funding, hike pension benefits.

Who hiked the pension benefits?

State legislators (State Representatives and State Senators) including Jack Franks, and the Governor then signed the bills into law.

There have been hundreds of legislative pension benefit hikes to underfunded pensions.

Back in 2011, Bill Zettler listed some of the worst legislative pension benefit hikes to underfunded pensions, in the book, Illinois Pension Scam.

Start on Page 3 of the book.

The book is free with Amazon Unlimited, $2.99 on Kindle, and $14 paperback.

Anyone can figure out that hiking pension benefits, and not funding the hikes, at a time when money is owed to pension fund, is a bad idea.

That’s like saying you owe $10, so sign something into law saying you owe another $1.

And it was done over, and over, and over.

And predictably, the hole got deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

Furthermore, the salaries were also hiked, which further hikes the pension payout.

So now we have a pension disaster.

The spin is, the politicians did not contribute enough to the pension funds.

Now that’s a half truth.

That did happen.

But that is not the core problem.

Why?

Many reasons, including the following.

Many pension systems in Illinois are funded locally (local police, local fire, IMRF), but the benefits are passed by state legislators.

So STATE politicians HIKED benefits, while LOCAL pensions were underfunded.

Thus, LOCAL politicians have to come up with funding.

That is an example of an unfunded mandate.

———-

A note, there are hundreds of local pensions due to each local fire and police pensions being individual funds for each police department, fire department, and fire protection district.

Contrast fire and police, to IMRF.

In IMRF, the investments are pooled to one giant fund, but for accounting purposes, the funding of each taxing district (city, park district, township, etc.) is kept separate, and thus each taxing district in IMRF has its own funding level.

The contrast the five “state” pension funds to police, fire, and IMRF.

The five state pension funds are teachers (TRS), university workers (SURS), state employees (SERS), judges (JRS), and members of the general assembly (GARS) which are state legislators and such.

Some TIF incentive (what the incentive was is left unstated) to Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation is labeled as a “corporate handout.”

The C.A.K.E. Village is located at 611 East Main Street (Rt 72) in East Dundee, Illinois 60118.

http://www.TheCakeVillage.com

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Read Nancy Zettler’s flyer above again.

“He has voted OVER 50 TIMES to give away our tax dollars to corporations.”

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CORPORATIONS.

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Nancy Zettler labels a facility that educates youth about African culture a corporation.