Restaurant Tax

I always hear that Republicans are for reducing taxes, but so far all I see, in Fishers, are Republicans that want to raise taxes and give tax breaks to rich Republicans. The 1% Restaurant Tax is a good example. When they first started talking about it was to raise money for the 911telephone system. Oh you didn’t remember that, well after a while they found the money elsewhere. So then it became a need for money to have economic development. Well that didn’t fly too good with the voters. After all why are apartments on town property being given tax breaks for the developer? Why am I supporting luxury apartments? Is my 1% going to support other developers? The Town Council has not been able to clearly define what they mean by economic development. My guess is because the money was going to be used to support their local buddies. Time to shift gears then they told us the tax was to help reduce property taxes. OK is any body is buying that story? The tax rate is set and it is not going down. Then the real funny story it would reduce property taxes about $35 a year per home. That is one visit to a restaurant. Maybe instead of enacting a new tax, if they want us to buy this story, just reduce taxes. Now they are starting to claim it will be used to help the schools. The School Board even approves, I have to wonder if the school board was told the whole story, since one of the highest paid executives of the school corporation is a paid consultant to the Town of Fishers. I have always wondered about the legal but morally wrong conflict of interest. If the Town wanted to help the school board they would stop the TIF districts and let the real property tax money flow to the schools. Now the town announces a new office building in the downtown area. Pay attention folks, it is being build on land that the town is buying up very quietly and being basically being given to the developer to use for free and on top of that they are giving him about $1.4 million in tax breaks. In return this developer is going to use the first floor for his offices and then rent the second floor to the town. Sweet deal. BTW- this developer’s name and address can be found on the candidate political contribution forms that were filed by the many of the candidates sitting on the town council as well as the effort to block Fishers becoming city. On top of all of this the word is the Fishers Redevelopment Commission is paying top dollar to buy up this land. Did you know the Town is buying up all the downtown land? Since when is the Town in the real estate business? What happen to private business? Notice how these deals all of a sudden pop up as a done deal. So here we have a Republican Town Council wanting to raise taxes, just to raise taxes because they think they can. Then they give land and tax breaks to certain developers, I call them their buddies. Isn’t it funny how these developers donated a lot of money to political campaigns?