Not the best way for these people to come across by running down someplace they barely have ever been much less had the gas money to travel to and that includes in many cases the people have problems making it to iNDIANAPOLIS for crying out loud. Much less Chicago where I lived in the Chicagoland area for 6 years. Personally I find either of those cities far superior to Louisville when it comes to business opportunities, job creation, educational experiences and whatever else makes a stellar community. Louisville is well....just KCTCS, U of L and Bellarmine and U of KAY down the road burning couches.
Louisville has to brag about itself because it really doesn't have anything else to brag about. No real museums of national consequence, a middling zoo and planetarium and art museum of minor importance. If it wasn't for hole in the wall bars, getting drunk, Whiskey and such Louisville wouldn't have anything to offer.
By the way in six years or so, I lived in the East End (Middletown), South End (Okolona/Fern Creek) and SW Louisville (PRP/Shively and I've been all over and criss-crossed the city hundreds if not thousands of times. Its not all that special and I've been to Chicago, Toronto, NYC, Cincy, Columbus, Indy, Atlanta, Charlotte, Charleston SC, NOLA, etc. Dozens more as well. Louisville doesn't have anything that's really worth writing home about. A real estate agent guru or developer might be able to swoon people on the idea that Louisville aka Loubilly is a great place to people that don't know any better but for us that lived in S. Indiana and Kentucky and elsewhere over the years, well we know better.
The problem with Louisville is that it has a major league dose of narcissism along with various other schizophrenic personality disorders in that it wants to be all things to all people yet fails at doing even the most basic things. Its kind of like the JCPS being 127th out of 158 Kentucky school systems in a state that is 47th in educational attainment, 41st in university quality, and in the 40s on K to 12 education most years. Ouch.yikes.
Louisville is like the middle aged woman whose best years are behind her but tries to put on a pound of makeup to compensate for the fact she has wrinkles and been ridden hard and put up wet. It kind of reminds me of a woman we used to go to church with that forgot she was 40 years old and still thought she was 20 in 2008. She wore enough makeup that if you took a small ball pein hammer and touched her face it with it would all looked like plaster of Paris collapsing from her face to reveal her true face. That's the Louisville they don't want you to see because they're trying to trick enough people into being rubes and staying in provincial Louisville because otherwise it will become another Memphis or Detroit.
Louisville has a cultural sensitivity problem as well when someone makes intelligent and pointed comments about a certain issue that people get so bent out of shape about what the person says that they wall themselves off from common sense and reason and enter into immediate attack mode. The same could be said for the sordid shape of Louisville school which are horrendous in that half the kids can't even write and read in basic 12th grade English nor pass exams for math at a 10th grade level and the same for science. When only half the 12th graders can pass English language and composition exams it speaks of a serious problem. The same when the math passing rate is 40 percent and science at a 10th grade level is 36 percent. That's putting a whole lot of scientific and cultural illiterates into the job market and university systems where they have to receive remedial education either at colleges or someone else teaching them.
Add in the fact that Louisville is serious underwater when it comes to the Metropolitan Sewer District being about 4 billion dollars in debt plus needing billions in repairs that it currently doesn't have the money for and would need federal grants to upgrade the ailing sewer system along with the flood wall protection that has been seriously degraded over the past 25 years plus with little preventative maintenance done to upgrade or preserve the existing system. Of course, the Lousyville right to know media doesn't want to talk about that nor do they want to talk about ongoing police corruption scandals like the Explorer scandal not to mention all of the payouts of money of lawsuits that have been made by Louisville city government because of the corruption of the system.
Let's also talk about the monstrosity called the Yum Center which was supposedly to be built with funds extracted from LOCAL businesses through tax increment financing. The original cost of construction for the Yum Center was 350 million dollars of principal from construction and moving the LGE facility away from its place near the arena. The overall cost over 30 years was going to be about 1 billion dollars or approximately 35 million a year. The principal though was not to be paid until starting in 2020 which is next year at a amount of 17.5 million per year for 20 years to pay it off. Only problem was that the bill for the arena just on interest payments from 2010 when it opened to 2040 maturation of bonds and financials was about 18 million a year or thereabouts.
The problem was that the arena wasn't even getting close to projections made by government, the mayor and the commission that oversaw its building. So the city of Louisville was having to shell out 7 to 10 million a year just to help pay the interest on the Yum Center and that's not including the principal that starts effectively in 2020.
So what did the city fathers of Louisville do along with all of the big financial backers. They did some more creative financing to where the general public is going to be paying for the Yum Center until 2054 another 14 years past the original date it was supposed to be paid off. Interesting, isn't it? So that would allow for less interest be paid per year although it would increase the interest payments over the long haul of the financing for another 15 years. So let's say that Lousyville was able to get less interest payments per year but then add years to the bill which effectively runs up more of a bill to get the finance charges off the front end of the payment scheme. All the while Louisville still ends up paying the principal for the Yum Center over the next few decades or at least until the arena is then 44 years old in 2054. Wonder how they are going to keep up the Yum Center will all of that maintenance that will be needed in the years from 2025 to 2054 since basketball arenas and public buildings need massive flows of capital expenditure and maintenance costs rise over the years as a structure becomes more in need of repair.
That's basically what Louisville is all about. Keep putting on lipstick and makeup on a pig and trying to make it look better than it really does. Oh and the funny thing about that woman is that she looks horrendous without the makeup and so does Louisville when you wash away the makeup and the mascara and lipstick.
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