Secondly, of the $9 Million dollar hole in the budget for this year it could have been entirely filled if the Village got out of the hotel & convention center business. The total taxpayer loss due to the convention center & hotel is $15.7 million this year. $9.1 million in sales taxes and $6.6 million in property tax exemption/shifting.

Third, the Village should cut numerous other non-core functions including selling the airport, selling the baseball stadium, not giving $6.5 million to a luxury home builder, stop saving $1 Mil+ per year for a new 2nd performing arts center when you still don’t reliably fill up the first one, don’t give $500K per year to the NW convention Bureau, and $100k more to many other membership organizations, cut back or eliminate the travel for the board to go to conferences. This is not an exclusive list but as you can see there is a lot of fat to be cut from this budget.

This entire budget crisis can be solved without laying off a single village employee. Unfortunately, the Village Board and Village management didn’t make good decisions in the first place and when the recession hit they didn’t adequately make changes to their plan to avoid the crisis we are in now.

The only solution that they Village Board has proposed is raising taxes, as they have done 17 times in the past, when things get tough. Now it’s time for the taxpayers to get tough on the Village Board and force them to cut the wasteful spending.