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Today's Poll: Should the City of Batavia invest in economic development?

By Howard B. Owens
Mark Potwora

The city has been ...With little results...

there was a poll were most don't believe we should hire a coordinator..

http://thebatavian.com/howard-owens/todays-poll-should-city-hire-econom…..

Council always seems to do the opposite of what the people want.

Nobody wanted to hire an asst manager last year and look what happened.

http://thebatavian.com/howard-owens/todays-poll-should-batavia-hire-ass…

Jan 27, 2015, 9:32am Permalink
Rich Richmond

If there is a true need for economic development local business have seen results or not and will support it on their own. This is another tax increase we can ill afford on top of our new Assistant City Manager.

True need ties into Vibrant Batavia as well.

Vibrant Batavia has shown they are good at fundraising for neighborhood activities such as coffee talks, block parties, picnics, ice cream socials and beautification projects. These are all good things.

These are all good things done by other service organizations and churches.

Basically, Vibrant Batavia is a taxpayer paid Service Organization with a salaried director. The fifty-thousand-dollars they are asking for is a 1% tax increase on top of the other unnecessary tax increases in the budget.

Everybody agrees they are good at raising money. They no longer need our taxpayer seed money and it’s time for Vibrant Batavia to sink or swim on their own.

Jan 27, 2015, 9:47am Permalink
Brian Heick

Sure, Batavia could use another mismanaged adventure just like BID. Lets take an example from GCEDC and get some more overpaid corporate lackeys in with no oversight.

Jan 27, 2015, 10:20am Permalink
Brian Graz

Economic Development for who???
It's not the governments role to create jobs. When it does, the increase in the bureaucracy and expenditures to do so does not justify any successes. One example is GCEDC where the bureaucrats are the primary beneficiaries... they create a bunch of $20-40k/yr jobs and they receive six figure salaries... all paid for by the people who are already working [aka taxpayers].

Jan 27, 2015, 11:39am Permalink
John Roach

If Council will not get rid of what many of us believe is an unnecessary Assistant Manager job, then let her do the BDC job rather than pay someone else $70,000 to do it.

We paid for the BDC coordinator with the idea we were not going to add to City full time staff. And as 1st ward Councilman Doeringer said, that was the idea with Vibrant Batavia also. Well, we ended up with a very high paid employee anyway, so again, let her do the jobs.

Jan 27, 2015, 12:05pm Permalink

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