I eagerly read the article on "Why Do People Come to Bend," in today's Bulletin.
So much work, so little revealed.
Did any of you find anything surprising in the results?
People come to Bend for leisure/recreation? Really?
I suppose it had to be done, but I think I could have constructed a similar graph out of pure guesswork.
Anyway, the only real number that I raised my eyebrows over was that the #1 place people visited was Downtown Bend, at 58%; followed by the Old Mill District, at 44%. Even more than all of the outdoor and sightseeing sights.
The other number that seemed interesting to me was the separation between Recreation and Visiting friends and family; in talking to customers, I think this is most often a combination.
What can I glean from this?
I want to stay in Downtown, but I already knew that.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
The city anticipates that the other $24M will come from land sales at JR and from bonds supported by the JR redevelopment district. However so far land sales have resulted in multi-million dollar losses due to the cost of infrastructure improvements agreed to by the city.
*
Yes, BP every deal the city does it loses more money, my figure on Les-Schwab is that it was an 8 to 1 loss, the Suterra was a 4 to 1 loss, so perhaps the next deal might be a better loss? Maybe even someday the city will make a paper profit.
For consider this, the ONLY benefactor to date of the JR spending spree has been Knife-River(hap-taylor).
What I'm saying above is that for every dollar that city got to deposit into their general fund on the Suterra deal it cost them $4 for dollars.
things going on here.
1.) Money is being pushed to Knife-River as a make work project. I can explain this, hap-taylor, taylor-NW, is sitting on MILLION's a month of heavy-equip costs, if they don't have recurring revenue from the city they'll have to auction their equipment all this shit is to keep one company in biz.
2.) Hap-Taylor, taylor-nw is the no-big exclusive excavator of HOLLERN, aka brooks resources, its rather certain with the cozy relationship that Brooks MUST have financial interest in Taylor(knife-river).
3.) The BULLetin paper has sold worthless land it got from HOLLERN to the city for $5M, which keeps the BULL afloat this year.
4.) The city bought worthless land from Taylor in boyd-acres for $4M, to keep them afloat.
The city is being made bankrupt, in order to keep the BULL, HOLLERN(BROOKS), TAYLOR(knife-river) afloat, that is whats going on, nothing more.
I am not running for office, and I neither endorse nor not endorse the following Bilbo messages.
Reader beware.
I've always said, there are some nuggets in there, if you can stand to wade through it all.
I may ask Bilbo to post only original messages here, instead of multiple postings...but that would require a lot more work on my part.
So for the time being I'm just sort of pressing the 'print' button.
Dunc for Mayor, a friend of Bend's lation population.
didn't you have a link to Suterra's entry permit somewhere? I can't find it and want to upload and link it to the picture post I put up today. - Bruce
....
'suterra's entry permit', you can get the 'text' from the suterra sales agreement.
The 'entry permit' is on the 'back-dated' sales-agreement, its in their BP. The way the sales contract is written is that payment is executed 10/22/08, on that day $2.4M went to the 'general fund', in that same contract, it says that Suterra has legal access to property as of 10/4/2008.
So here's the deal we now know, and I want EVERYONE to know this SHIT has NOTHING to do with the election, its just that all these public doc's became available in the last few weeks to us, so we could put 2 & 2 together. Just happenstance that we're discussing the city of bend, who would have guessed.
OK, so here's what really happened BP, and I wish you would post it over on bebb as he deletes what I post.
This summer Hap-Taylor ( Taylor-NW ) hit bottom, they had a hard-time paying their heavy-equipment costs, which means all their machines get REPO'd, 100% of ALL Brooks development in tri-county I done by (KNIFE-RIVER aka taylor) I'm sure given the NO-BID deal of city&brook with KR that Brooks has a financial interest in Taylor.
The excavation started 10/4/2008, because the Tetherow stopped then because the money stopped, Taylor had no work, the work at NWXC has slowed, in order to get work for Taylor the city allowed Taylor to start the Suterra development infrastructure on 10/4/2008, even though the date-of-sale is 10/22/2008. What difference did it make? The deal was always about 'make work' for Knife-River, nothing about JR.
If KR(hap-taylor) bend folds that means there is NO excavation, which means development folds, this is what happends when a no-bid preference monopoly by brooks is allowed to run out 1998->2008, now KR is the last man standing on one broken leg.
The answer to your question BP, is that the 'suterra access' is implicit back-dated to 10/4/2008 in the Suterra Sales agreement of 10/22/2008.
There really was no suterra access to speak of, all work being done is paid for by the city of Bend to KR, so its all a big joke. Just on paper its a deferred SDC, but everybody knows that nobody ever has to pay ( well except taxpayers ).
....
You tax-payers have to understand what is going on in BEND.
The way HOLLERN has this city setup is that Knife-River(TaylorNW) is the ONLY excavator in the tri-county.
They have no work, which means they can't pay their big yellow lease payments, fuck the employees that is what un-employment insurance paid by state is, but BIG YELLOW EQUIP that costs $1M per machine, do the math, that $10k/mon per machine. KR has 100's of machines.
When Tetherow went down, cuz of lack of funding last month, all projects in the area ceased, there is a little work going on at NWXC, but that's it, folks that work for KR are telling me that they have never seen things this slow in their working lives.
BP there are TWO rhetorical questions that you must focus on.
1.) Why did the BULL&HOLLERN bush 'deferred SDCs' when in fact their only purpose is to treat JR expenses as on asset??
2.) Why is the City spending on average $10M in debt to get $2M in cash?? Thats a 500% interest charge.
The way this town is setup is that when KR gets is machines REPO'd all excavation will cease. Think about the ramifications.
BB2 is redneck dunc, we trust you, being near super-burrito, we don't go to no gringo BB2 site for news, we come to you.
Dunc, I think you'll find this pretty interesting:
First National Brontosaurus
The trouble with that is, it's the wrong direction. Mega-mergers aren't the solution to the issue, they're an aggravating factor. And if we don't revise our thinking, we'll soon reach a new distinction: too big to survive. Because the truth is, big doesn't make you safer. Larger equals riskier.
Any evolutionary biologist could tell you that...
In another distant age – 1973 – economist E. F. Schumacher suggested a different approach. Shumacher was an associate of the ultra-influential John Maynard Keynes and a statistician and advisor to the British Coal Board. From this you might expect to find Schumacher's economic insights to be right in the center of the Keynesian ideas that now dominate our world. Instead, Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered" is not only revolutionary, but looked on by some economists in the same way Iranian Ayatollahs look on The Satanic Verses.
What Shumacher puts forward in Small is Beautiful is the idea that not only are large industries dehumanizing, they're also painfully inefficient.
"The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed."
--E. F. Shumacher
There's a lot of fuzzy thinking that suggests large companies begat large profits and they can, but what Schumaker shows is that, on a piece by piece basis, large companies are frequently less efficient (and as a bonus, they're much more likely to be miserable places to work). The best way for large corporations to survive long term is not by throwing their weight around, but by behaving like a collective of small organizations....
For Schumacher, the kind of system we've built is not only impossibly unstable, but frankly insane. As we've been reminded so many times in this campaign season, it's small business that generates the most new jobs, provides the greatest opportunity, and act as the most powerful engine of our economy. However, though our laws and behavior, we lure companies to become larger, just as nature provides incentives for animals to grow larger. But where nature and animals are driven by physical constraints that don't involve volition, we have a choice. Big animals die when the system gets stressed. So do big companies...
Can you say Linens and Things? Mervyn's? Lehman Borthers? The list goes on and on.
Oh, I realized years ago that I'm way, way more efficient than The Mass Market.
They're like the railroads, shooting off whole herds of buffalo and taking only the hides.
I'm like the Indian, using the hide, eating the meat, the horn for a water holder, etc. etc. Using up every bit.
If I was given the same opportunity in price, and timeliness, without the 'exclusives' I can more than compete with the Mass Market.
Unfortunately, we aren't given equal opportunity.
But we still survive, despite all the advantages that the big guys are given -- because we are more efficient, more knowledgeable.
Another example: I've always just shaken my head over the idea that a certain percentage would be given over the theft and damage.
I'm sorry. Zero percent is the acceptable level of theft and damage, and I succeed almost all the time in that goal.
And so on...
Think about this: the second level of every category buster mass market chain are cracking: Circuit City, Borders, Linens and Things, etc.
But...this only points out the weakness of the entire model. The biggest guys have the same problems, but it hasn't quite reached crisis levels yet.
It's a ponzi scheme, I tell ya.
Another example. Until the shipping costs rose so drastically lately, I was able to get any book or comic or game that was available anywhere within 2 to 7 days.
If I didn't know what you were looking for, and I probably had a much higher chance of knowing than a clerk at B & N or Walmart, I could find out right then and there. I could order it for you, right then and there.
When I first started carrying Manga, I made a point of immediately ordering anything anyone wanted that day, and I would always get a surprised look in their face when it actually arrived when I said it would.
Often I get the response: I was told I couldn't get it, or that it was unavailable, or I ordered it but it never came....and on and on.
But you know what?
It didn't matter.
The Manga kids still gave the majority of their business to B & N, because they'd get the newest stuff in a couple days sooner, (a supposedly illegal competitive advantage that seems to happen anyway) no matter what I did, and they get huge stacks of the latest releases.
It's an inefficient blunderbuss approach that simply overwhelms my small efficiencies.
I guarantee that when Manga is no longer profitable, or selling in large quantities, that the mass market will quit getting the newest and greatest, and will still be inefficient in getting an adequate backstock or special ordering.
The customer ends up with less and less service and selection and support and knowledge in the long run.
I'm really bummed that the Bend tourism agency paid an out-of-state consulting firm to do a survey that it could've done itself.
One of the many things that makes me go GRRRR about the way Bend is run is the consultant-retention policy (if it can be called a policy).
Bend hires consultants on fat contracts for b.s. tasks that offer no immediate tangible benefit to the town, like the survey, or the Visioning process, or the "affordable housing" nonissue, or promoting tourism (which is not the worst example, but local tourist-dependent businesses could/should do this themselves).
But on issues where the City has no experience whatsoever and which are big-money, serious matters that affect our everyday life, like public transportation, ADA compliance, selecting Juniper Ridge tenants, how best to fund infrastructure, etc., Bend "goes it alone" and leaves the whole process to sway in the wind of political influence.
So when Bend, a city that famously has never had public transportation, decided to buy buses, the City procurement official and his underlings decided to do it themselves and of course messed it up. Same with Juniper Ridge - the City Council decided to select Les Schwab and work out the contract with little knowledge of how it's been successfully done elsewhere, and again screwed it up. When it lost an ADA suit filed by the Justice Dept. (proving it didn't know how to comply with ADA), it decided to run its own compliance efforts and screwed that up too. Same with SDCs - the process of deciding how much to charge and when is controlled by politics with no regard to what ACTUALLY might be the best way to fund infrastructure in Bend.
When Bend needs to do a survey of visitors that any Bend High student council member could have done just fine, it takes no chances and hires the best consultants it can find. But when millions of taxpayer dollars and the City's infrastructure are at stake, it figures what the hell, let's do this ourselves, what's the worst that can happen.
The results speak for themselves, right?
Of course the use of consultants by the visitors' bureau is political too: if they did things the most cost-effective way, they would have a very hard time spending the amount of room tax allocated to them. They figure it's "use it or lose it."
BEM,
Thanks for articulating what I was feeling. Really fluffy survey.
Post a Comment