Meanwhile, Louisville likes to tout itself as being a "Possibility City" all the while the Louisville, Ky Metropolitan area is one of the worst educated and worst performing economies for young professionals in comparison with other sister cities of the same size and regional data. Louisville, as a city has been lagging behind other regional cities in the South and Midwest. Places like Charlotte, NC, Kansas City, KS, Indianapolis, IN, Nashville, TN, and many more that could easily be found in reports going back years from the Brookings Institution and other organizations.
It might also be noted that Louisville has a crumbling infrastructure issue in its city with crumbling surface streets that are often patched in the most slipshod and mediocre manner instead of correctly paved and resurfaced. Instead, the Mayor of Louisville in 2018, is Greg Fischer who was brought into power by the Democratic Party after about 50 years of constant Democratic control of local politics. All the while over those 50 years from 1968 to present, Louisville has continued to decline from being a well known metropolis that was thriving into a increasingly dangerous and violent place. Over the past few years, like many other US Metropolises Louisville has been going through a crime wave which interacts with its obvious poverty problems due to the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs over the last 25 plus years.
However, unlike other cities, Louisville has had the mentality of bringing in more low wage jobs that recreating the business and economic conditions necessary to bring about higher wage growth and career opportunities. Louisville tends to focus on more low wage employment with people in low wage service industries, package handling and box flipping operations and little in the way of sustainable economic growth. Instead, Louisville has went prostrate for private businesses in the cargo and freight handling industries of which pay is very low in many cases and employees often barely make ends meet.
All the while, Louisville Kentucky continues to have a school system in the Jefferson County Public Schools that in 2016-2017 ranked 122nd out of 159 Kentucky school systems as reported by the stats from the Kentucky Department of Education
Meanwhile this trend has been evident over several years as the Jefferson County Public Schools has been one of the worst performing districts in all of Kentucky a state that regularly ranks in the bottom 10 states of all states in the United States of America. The average yearly ranking over the past decade has been between 118th to 130th for most of the past 10 years.
Since we're on Louisville and its crummy school system and crummy infrastructure despite nearly 4 billion dollars being spent on the Ohio River Bridges Project linking Indiana and Kentucky, lets talk about why Louisville is partially in these financial straits. With two new bridges and a refurbished John F Kennedy I 65 bridge between Louisville and Indiana, lets talk about how Kentucky didn't have the money set aside for improvements for their own infrastructure to carry interstate traffic between the two states. Also to the point the state of Indiana ended up paying for an interstate tunnel underneath an old non historic property in Louisville on Interstate 265.
All the while in 2010, Louisville opened a brand spanking new basketball arena that houses the University of Louisville men's and women's basketball team built at an original cost of approximately 350 million dollars financed by tax increment financing bonds over a 30 year period. Louisville's previous mayor and Democratic governor along with the blessing of the former Republican governor of Kentucky from 2003 to 2007 all felt that Louisville needed a new arena. Although the facts were that Louisville as a city couldn't support such an arena without having an NBA Basketball team nor an NHL Hockey franchise.
So instead they built such a facility for 350 million dollars to host maybe 40 basketball related events during the year and the occasional concert for Louisville residents. The economic breakdown of this is listed in my analysis of the situation that was originally hatched by the Louisville Arena Authority. Another gentleman more endowed in economic knowledge than myself called it the Billion Dollar Basketball due to the increasing interest payments that would accrue for 30 years until 2040. Including a ten year period from 2010 to 2020 where none of the principal was to be paid off and instead the city government and Louisville Arena Authority would eat the bill. Of course, to the detriment of the local taxpayers who will end up losing government services and deal with more crumbling infrastructure and less necessary services.
Your esteemed ex-mayor left Louisville with a bill for an arena that you currently can't pay for except to steal more money from the city treasury. Fifteen million in yearly interest capped with a seventeen million dollar yearly principal payment starting in 2020. That's 32 million a year and the tax increment financing system is only bringing in a few million a year versus the 12 to 15 million it was projected to.
This sordid state of affairs has been going on for a few years with the city constantly ending bailing out an arena that was shoddily planned in order to be fiscally feasible. Despite the fact that Louisville had no NBA teams wanting to move there nor the NHL beating at their doorstep. All the while the arena was considered as junk bonds by a well known rating agency. Although they have claimed to have turned the corner, I find it quite laughable that they couldn't pay for the arena without city funding to pay for it and not be able to pay the interest much less the principal in a few years.
That's the Louisville way is to promise big and deliver nothing of real value just a bunch of puppies and rainbows to keep the citizenry in the dark and clueless to how they are being screwed economically, educationally, and in so many ways that it is not even remotely funny.
Another thing about Louisville is its police corruption problems where corrupt and crooked cops have attempted to cover up a sexual abuse scandal called the Young Explorers scandal where police were sexually abusing teenagers through their program of having kids observe the police and other police community interactions.
Let's talk some more and truth to power about Louisville. In addition to corrupt cops, they also have a very high crime rate these days for a city its size. All the while the city tries to cover it up because in 2003 they added almost 400,000 in population by annexing the rest of Jefferson County, Kentucky to become a city of 694,000 people in 2003 and now 760,000 in 2017. All the while the crime rate for the inner city areas has exploded by Louisville is supposedly one of the safer cities but only after you add the white flight areas of Eastern and Southern Jefferson County which have somewhat lower crime rates.
Most of the South End from Bardstown Road all the way to the West End and down to Valley Station looks like a waste dump that even soap and penicillin would be hard pressed to clean up. Add in the proclivities of local residents to leave trash all over the place and not fix up their run down slum neighborhoods with nasty apartment blocks.
As a former resident of several years I was so amazed to finally leave the city in 2012 and it was like having color return to our lives when we moved out of that nasty city. Louisvlle really has nothing to offer a family outside of the Louisvlle Zoo and some small time cultural events. Nothing that would attract young professionals and relocating job seekers. Is essence Louisville has no pro sports and exists as a hybrid big city which acts like a college town that only has one thing really going for it until recently and that was basketball galore. In fact Louisvillians only seem to talk about basketball and the whole UK and U of L rivalry for several months out of the year. Where I am from, our in state rivalries we talk about for 3 or 4 days and move onto more important things. However, that's the Louisville mentality that the city only seems to run on basketball and not much else.
Another horrid place in the Louisville region is the city of Shepherdsville and the county of Bullitt. Why you might ask? Because despite the efforts of Bullitt County leaders, it remains one of the least educated counties in all the state of Kentucky and remains also one of the most corrupt. Despite the fact that the county is 15 miles from Louisville, it remains a sort of hellhole that would take a person an hour to describe in writing so I'll leave it for a future article.
Kentucky 47th among the states in per capita income, 47th in college graduates as a percentage of population, number one in child abuse, number one in elder abuse, last in just about everything else. But that's Kentucky and its that inbred and backwards. In fact, Kentuckians talk about how they like it that way even though the rest of the nation would shake its head living in Kentucky. In fact, Kentucky ranks just about the bottom of most everything socioeconomic, financially, educationally, and ranks near the bottom in many other categories among the 50 states. Only Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia along with occasionally Alabama or South Carolina boost Kentucky up a couple of places.
Why I can't stand Louisville you might ask? There are a myriad of things I saw during my time there including its crummy economy and a city with a plethora of crappy employers all over the city that refuse to pay decent enough wages to support oneself. Add in incompetent city government, lousy roads, drivers who can't observe basic rules of the road, an illiterate and backwoods culture as well as an educational system that is the worst I've ever seen. Louisville is like a toilet bowl, its always full of itself and thinks there's nowhere out there better. People from Louisville need to take a reality check and realize their city isn't even in top 50 of anything. Not even among comparable cities. The educational system produces generations of hillbillies who can barely speak or put together any sentence of reasonable quality. Same goes for half of the people in the workforce. The funniest thing is that they're so sure of yourselves and their reliance on sports that the rest of their state is like a Third World country and includes Louisville
What's going to be funny is that in a few years their productive businesses will figure out how to leave town instead of paying the outrageous taxes to feed generations of welfare trash that live in Louisville. They'll figure out that they can make more money elsewhere whether that would be in Indiana or maybe even Tennessee. Frankly moving away from the toilet bowl called Louisville was the best thing my family and I could have done. We could have probably went to TN but we prefer northern climates. But please do the good people of Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, etc a favor and keep from ruining your neighboring states.
We don't want your Third world mentality in our states. People in all those states have a better standard of living and education systems than Kentucky. I've lived in several states and worst place I ever lived was in Louisville, bar none. A joke of a metro area if there ever was one. Kentuckians might not all live in trailers as the stereotype goes but the trailer trash mentality is certainly alive and well in Louisville. When I moved to Kentucky in late 2007, I held no preconceived notions or opinions about Kentucky. When I left, I knew living in Louisville was a big mistake. Even my wife who grew up in Louisville was glad to leave. That speaks volumes in itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment