BLD isn’t a drag on budget??????????????

Manteca Bulletin's editor asserts Big League Dreams “pays” the city $380,000 a year! Saves $500,000 in “maintenance.” And the money given to BLD, about $31,000,000, came from a magical pre-existing “pool of money” that’s “not being paid back.” (Yet in the next sentence he says all RDA funds are “borrowed.”)

I want to hear more about this magical pool filled with money that has been discovered in Manteca. I’d like to go for a swim. Especially if it’s money you don’t have to pay back.

How can the city officials make such an outlandish claim, you ask? What they mean is that there’s not a budget line item called “pay back the loan for BLD.” Therefore, that particular money isn’t actually being paid back out of some fund that they decide “counts.” But make no mistake, when you borrow $31 million, it has to be paid back. That “paying back” may occur at some stage and under some convoluted structure before the money reaches the city general fund, but it still costs just as much no matter what word games are used to snow the council and the public.

By the way, about how much is this loan pay back every year? Just estimating with a financial calculator and the current bond rates, the loan payments (debt service) for BLD is somewhere in the range of $1.7 to $1.9 million each year.

The city officials, with the help of the Bulletin, hope you’ll be bamboozled with large numbers. So let me break it down for you:

Let's say you open a pizza shop. You rent the store front and pay employees. The rent and employees costs $1,900 a month. You sell $380 worth of pizzas. Have you made money? Well, you could say you took in $380 or use some other evasive language. But, in fact, you would be losing money, you wouldn’t even be able to pay the rent with the amount of pizzas you sold.

The editor would have us believe that only “critics” of the project count the loan payment, and proponents of the project count the “income.” As if the numbers depend on your feelings. The BLD costs $1,900,000 a year and “brings in” $380,000. Those numbers add up to a loss of over $1.5 million each year and it doesn’t matter if you “like” the BLD or if you’re a “critic.”

I haven’t even gotten to the crazy claim that it saves the city $500K in “maintenance.” First of all, look at how much BLD budgets each year for maintenance. The last time I saw their budget, which was a few years ago, it was just a little over $100K. That’s like your boss asks you how much you spent on gas to go on a business trip, you spent $100 but you tell the boss you spent $500.

But more importantly, the “savings” isn’t a savings at all. Building the thing incurred the cost of maintenance (i.e., if they didn’t build it there wouldn’t be any maintenance costs!). In addition, the logic is wrong, it’s simply a mental construct….

I would explain more but I have to go out and mow the lawn. In fact, I’m saving the city $100/month by mowing my lawn. After all, that’s what it would cost the city to mow my lawn, so I’m “saving” the city that money. hehehe

BLD isn’t a drag on budget