Editor’s Note: Nothing in this article is meant to take away anything from the North Shelby School, Principal Allison Hodges and her staff. They are dedicated to what they do and who they do for. They are top of the line and can’t help who they have to work for. The fault there lies with the voters who put Bully and his crew in office to start with.
This is a story that keeps on giving. Now, for the rest of the story. Paying for the new North Shelby School project.
For those citizens and taxpayers who haven’t paid much attention, the money that will pay for the new North Shelby School project has not been sitting around in a savings account somewhere drawing little to no interest. This will be borrowed money with many strings attached. And taxpayers will be paying high interest rates.
This is how it worked out.
The CCS school board, the same crowd who didn’t care how much this project was going to cost and didn’t have the money themselves, went to the Cleveland County Commissioners for money to build the new North Shelby School project. The Commissioners didn’t have the money either because of their many years of high give-away spending. Remember the Commissioners sales tax increase on this past election year ballots that the voters rejected by a wide margin. The commissioners were reminded that the voters are not much interested in wasteful spending.
But the commissioners are resourceful in a very negative and likely crooked way. And they have some secret projects that they want to spend lots of tax money on without drawing much public attention. Also, the commissioners brag about how good their bond ratings are, yet selling more bonds would bring on more attention to their finances than the commissioners wanted people to find out about. So the commissioners decide to borrow the money.
Therefore, the commissioners had their administration and financial people cast about for some suckers to borrow from. It turns out the suckers the commissioners were looking for were not to be found as easily as the sucker taxpayers in Cleveland County that keep on putting the crooked commissioners back into office like we do. The people with such money to lend want and demand security (collateral) for their loans as well as many fees and high interest rates on their money. Also, the commissioners were impressed on how well the school board had suppressed the crazy financial details on the new North Shelby School project that they decided to do the same crazy wheeling and dealing too.
So, the commissioners used the new North Shelby School project as a smokescreen to go for a loan application to the money people. Only thing was, for the $13.5 million to build the new North Shelby School, the commissioners added another $20.5 million for their own secret purposes. The commissioners are now borrowing $34 million in the name of building a new North Shelby School. And now comes the rub. The collateral required by the money people for that $34 million loan.
Since the Commissioners had only one property that was good enough for collateral and paid for the new Health Department was put up for collateral. Remember the Hospitals and HealthCare facilities, the old Health Department, etc. the commissioners sold for $100 million? Remember that the sale of the hospital included $23 million in advance to build a new Health Department. Remember the new Health Department that was built behind the DSS and was paid for out of that $23 million. You can now forget that the new Health Department was paid for. That property was used as PART of the collateral for the $34 million loan.
