The City Council's plans to use what they describe as an "innovative" funding scheme to pay for future projects, sets the city on the same path as Bernard Madoff who created the infamous Ponzi scheme which landed him in jail for the rest of his life. The talk of trying to pay for the trams debacle as well now as the grandiose development plan for Leith, by raising money "borrowed against future business rates" may be a scheme which looks attractive to the beleagured LibDem leader of the Council and her cronies, but to the sane man or woman in the street, it is simply a way of bankrupting the city for years to come.
Why on earth are the City Council so set on wanting to build up a mountain of debt, when it knows full well that we are in the deepest financial crisis the country has seen since the 1930s? This is surely the time to be prudent and to husband resources carefully, so that, when the economic indicators improve, the City is in a healthy financial position and not submerged in a sea of debt.
The planning for this Council Ponzi style scheme is based on future receipts from business, yet it only needs a walk round the main streets to realise how difficult the trading situation is at the moment. There are reports of hotels, restaurants and visitor attractions considering closure during the off-season for tourists, businesses closing and the difficulties of businesses finding start-up loans from the banks. Could the Council have picked a worse time to consider this kind of scheme if it had tried? I think not.
Finally we have the ongoing problems of the Leith and waterfront developments, where work has ceased and the developments have, like the tram, stalled for months. If they want to get this started then for goodness sake wait until we are over the financial crisis. No one is going to want to buy flats which are in a depressed area - which is what we have at the moment. The high-fliers and top executives which the Council were counting on, are no more as economic circumstances have changed. The last thing we all want is a LibDem legacy which will condemn the city to years in penury and the inevitably higher Council Tax to pay for their headstrong foolishness.
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