GFDA Angling For Mill Levy
There are some interesting items in today’s GFDA Quarterly Investor Letter, and perhaps none more so than priority #2:
2) Put a 3-mill economic development levy before Cascade County voters on the special election ballot to replace Ryan Zinke. Passage of this small levy would generate about $450,000 a year to make Great Falls and Cascade County more competitive in securing business investment for startups, expansions, and attractions. We need to raise $90,000 to mount this effort and ask that you consider a special one-time investment.
If successful, the GFDA will pose this question to voters 85 to 100 days after Ryan Zinke officially vacates his Congressional seat. Zinke is set to be confirmed as Secretary of the Interior on Feb 6.
NO WAY. This community already went ‘All In’ for the school bond and how often is somebody going to ‘raid the piggy bank (a.k.a, residential homes, rental owner, etc.)’ for more ‘loose change’? WHO will pay for putting this on a special ballot?
I think Brett Doney is one of the most effective people we have working in the city today. GFDA is money well spent.
How many of these new businesss has he personally talked to coming here !
Mayor Kelly, Great Falls Tribune, Jan 2016 “Great Falls is on the rise…”
Yes, likely a rise in despair, suicide and substance abuse but certainly not economically like we’ve been led to believe for a quite a while by the GFDA, Doney and Mayor Kelly and others in power.
I’ve been watching their “work” and I haven’t seen much value in the GFDA. A lot of the “growth” they claim responsibility for would have happened without the group’s involvement. Doney has been nothing more than a braggadocio. He was realistic, perhaps for the first time, when admitting Great Falls net job loss at the city commission meeting. The spin doctor couldn’t spin it this time. I don’t think the powers in charge vetted him well before hiring him from Maine.
From mainebiz.com:
“Doney led the Growth Council until 2006, when he stepped down to take a job in Montana as president of Great Falls Development Authority. These days, his tenure in Oxford Hills is looked upon with both admiration and disparagement, although the latter sentiment is voiced more vociferously than the former.
“”Doney was good for blowing his own horn, and thank God he moved to Montana,” says Forrie Everett, a member of the Paris Budget Committee, which last year recommended cutting $12,000 in town funding for the Growth Council. “I don’t have a very good opinion for the Growth Council. All we got from [Doney] was the soft shoe and ‘how great I am.'”….Barbara Payne, a former Paris selectman, says the Growth Council used to hand out glossy brochures listing its achievements every year around budget time. “But it didn’t give the whole picture. They didn’t track the businesses that closed or cut back or failed that they supported,” she says.”
Sounds exactly like the modus operandi for GFDA with Doney at the helm. Mill levy for GFDA–no way in hell!