Digging into the details

I talked recently on this blog about why my background has made me an ideal candidate for city council. And here’s another example of that. I’ve been through the Economic Development Professional National Development Council training. It was the equivalent of a fiscal boot camp, designed to teach me how to dig through fiscal records, and to figure out the growth potential and viability of businesses. We studied profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and all sorts of other fiscal documents.

The goal was for me as a community development director, to see which businesses were worth helping a town pursue. I also worked to figure out how best the state could assist in helping certain businesses and towns seal a deal. That for example, at times meant setting up a tax-increment financing district. The class and experience taught me how to decipher whether a potential business looking to open in a town would end up being a bonanza or boondoggle for that community. If we would have had councilors who possessed a background like that, we might not be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the Great Lakes Aquarium afloat, for example. I believe that background would help me bring a critical eye to spending, so we can avoid future boondoggles.