Philip's Busy Ditch

In his first posting of a new week, Philip R. Klein writes on the SET Political Review (emphasis is mine):

Even we sometimes just shake out heads. Why would a bankrupt city continue with a "quality of life" project when simple public service program funding is considered to be cut back? It is a pretty simple answer - but let's help set this up.

Since PRK has a great deal of personal experience in bankruptcy, I'm sure he knows that the City of Beaumont is not bankrupt.

As such, it's a bald-faced lie, followed by more exaggeration and misstatements of the truth:

The City Council of Beaumont - faced with a massive exodus of people due to the Beaumont Independent School District fiasco - has been desperately trying to lure not only outsiders to the city - but trying to have a place to keep the people home and entertain them. So after much adieu about nothing (drama) they decided to building a new building to have events and a huge lake for people to dump dead bodies.....sorry....to enjoy and have picnics, fish, and simply to enjoy - all in the one of the most crime ridden areas in the city.

PRK's logical fallacy, an appeal to ridicule, falls flat.  The Beaumont City Council scaled the project back considerably last summer. That "huge lake for people to dump dead bodies" referenced by Klein is now a two-acre lake and an event center to replace the Harvest Club. From the Beaumont Enterprise of June 24, 2009:

The scaled-back grand plan calls for just the two-acre lake and event center, which will replace the hurricane-battered Harvest Club at the former South Texas State Fairgrounds.

And in the revamped vision there are no plans to have a waterway flowing from the lake down Crockett Street.

Klein's reference to "the most crime-ridden areas of the city" implies this park will be located near Magnolia Gardens. Another falsehood: the actual location is downtown. The event center will be at the corner of Jefferson and Crockett. The new estimated cost is considerably more modest than original projections:

The Beaumont city council is set to spend $8,126,000 on a downtown event center and park.

From the Philip R. Klein School of Idionomics:

Well, all of the cities are going to hurt during their budgets this year. The average sales tax indicators are down - for Jefferson County - to the tune of 23-28%. Meaning - no money no government growth.

There is no such thing as an "average sales tax indicator." This concept, just like Beaumont's bankruptcy, exists only in Philip Klein's limited imagination. The  Texas Comptroller's website published the most recent tax data:

	Current Rate	Net Payment this Period	Comparable Payment Prior Year	% Change
Beaumont	1.500%	2,306,272.63	2,674,000.04	-13.75%

Texas Comptroller Susan Combs put these numbers into proper statewide perspective. From the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram:

"Following an eight-month stretch of double-digit declines, the pace of revenue losses is slowing," she said.

As Philip noted in his Nitwit Tidbits on Friday, "it's the economy, stupid." Klein's long-winded but short-sighted article eventually wanders close to a real point:

So what? So - here they go. They want to continue to build the ditch in downtown (the beautiful lake in crimeville) because it is a wonderful quality of life program - so they cut back on fire services and want to dump off EMS to the private sector. All of which?

None of this has happened yet.

While there are compelling arguments for both sides of this issue, Klein's juvenile and unsubstantiated opinions based on misstated half-truths and bald-faced lies do not constitute intelligent discourse.