Taxpayers of Sanders County bail out Lake County Bank
I am a firm believer in Capitalism. Sometimes an entrepreneur makes a good investment and sometimes he or she doesn’t.
The case at point is a couple of duplexes that are not selling. That is sad, but that is life. So now the contractors who built the duplexes did what they had to do and that is apparently turn over the property to the financing bank, and they move on.
The bank should do what it is supposed to do and that is attempt to sell the duplexes at what ever price as the market dictates and move on.
Instead, we see that we the taxpayers are going to bail out the bank, as evidenced by a Sanders County Community Housing Organization recently granted non-profit status (that is convenient). Now they will be able to provide affordable rental housing for low income families at the expense of all of us.
The majority of people living in the City of Plains made it clear a few years ago, when it was proposed to build a series of low cost housing in our city. At that time we clearly emphasized that we already had enough low income residents living in our city and in our county. Nothing has changed in that regard.
None of us have anything against low income people, but it really looks like a conspiracy to continue to drag this county lower and lower into the dregs of high unemployment and more and more low income families.
A non-profit housing organization is going to do little or nothing to help support our community; in fact it will be a drain on the community in the long run. Any property taxes, if any, will never pay for all of the additional city, county, schools and other services, which are now being dividedly paid for by just a few taxpayers.
Will three bedroom duplexes be reserved for senior citizens as the article in the paper insinuated by showing that the 2006 annual pay for seniors was just under $13,000 per year? Absolutely not! Everybody knows that section 8 housing pays more for family housing than it does for senior citizens.
No! What this county needs are jobs. The lumber and mining jobs have all but been stolen away by Sierra Club and other phony environmental groups who sweeten their pocket books with foundation money to ruin the economy of this county.
What this county needs are people who really care about the economy of the county and not the economy of a bank who made a bad loan at the wrong time to contractors who built a multitude of duplexes at the wrong time.
I apologize for missing the meeting where all of this took place, but some of us are too busy trying to do what we pay our elected officials to do.
Les Wood
Plains