Dear Neotribune editor:

The promoters who have been pushing a likely economically catastrophic jail proposal on Italy, have become more secretive in recent years, especially since one of their disasters, the poorly designed failed jail at Hardin, Montana, made international headlines. It wasn’t the first nor the last of their many schemes to go bust, merely the most notorious.

Their attempt to locate one of their boondoggles on a reservation in the southern suburbs of Tucson, Arizona, may have percolated along for years before being sprung on unsuspecting subdivision neighbors. The threat of a last-minute, regular picketing of concerts at the nearby tribal casino caused the project to be withdrawn. It subsequently faced possible relocation to a less powerful part of the district where poorer residents would be unlikely to be able organize an effective protest to the proposed danger in their midst.

What promoters have learned from these failures is to keep the news of their subsequent proposals away from the voting public until foolish local officials have committed those, whose interests they should be representing, to economic stagnation and unaffordable debt loads. They can walk away with millions if they’re allowed to get away with this, leaving little but a shipwreck in their wake.

The industry tends to rely on low-paid, high turnover employees, at best living paycheck to paycheck with little benefits to keep them solvent in case of illness or injury.

I am not particularly alarmist, but the upcoming “executive session” from which the public is excluded, could be a very bad sign, or hopefully, a good one.

Since the Economic “Development” Corporation may have chosen to conduct talks regarding its possible ratification of this travesty in private, one hopes local residents will call the seven committee members prior to any secretive meeting and express this dissatisfaction with such a potentially anti-democratic process.

The terms of the first three of these members, Mark Stiles, Mark Souder and Randy Boyd, are ending in a week. If they are actually promoting such foolishness, hopefully their appointments won’t be renewed. If anyone was planning to dump this dangerous boondoggle in my neighborhood, I’d want to get on the phone to the three and to their other four colleagues, Elmerine Bell, Tom Little, Joyce Hobbs and Darrell Rosemond.

The meeting that could advance an agenda to commit the City of Italy to this financial black hole will be held at 6:00 p.m. this Friday, June 18th, at City Hall, 105 Main street. It has been the modus operandi of this industry’s Music Men that they will pack any public meeting with those already on their payrolls and such gullible local small business owners as have been led to believe they will personally get rich off the proceeds of such a scheme.

What the committee members should be doing, if they have not yet done so, is to protect the interests of the public. They must perform simple “due diligence.” They need to review the background of the “team” of promoters, not just some purged /résumé /that has erased their failures. They should not rely on a trip to some privatized county jail where a sheriff is getting $1,000 monthly for ostensible oversight, and think that they are getting an objective view of the prospects. Would a promoter of a nuclear power plant take potential customers to Three Mile Island, or Chernoble, or to one of the many decommissioned facilities owned by bondholders with little, if any, equity remaining, or would they instead choose to showcase one which has not yet proven to be an environmental or economic disaster?

They should also review the state of the for-profit prison industry as a whole, which is on the brink of collapse due to massive overbuilding in the last few years. The national landscape is littered with an ever-growing number of empty and half-full speculative jails and prisons that are albatrosses around the collective necks of local governments and taxpayers.

Frank Smith
390 SE 110 Ave.
Bluff City, KS 67018
(620)967-4616

Comment from Mark Stiles, 6/21/10, 9:21am

I do not know the gentleman from Kansas that recently choose to write a letter to the Neotribune regarding the Italy Economic Development Commission. In the letter he made what I would call uninformed comments regarding the EDC plus he had some pretty strong statements regarding a company that builds and operates criminal justice facilities and is evidently considering Italy as a location for a facility.

As the President of the EDC I want to make sure that everyone knows that this company has not asked anything from the EDC that I am aware of. I would also inform anyone interested that we have no actions under consideration regarding this issue and have not been asked to consider any to my knowledge.

I would join the other members of the commission inviting the public to attend our meetings. We are all working diligently to bring good jobs and economic development to Italy and our area. We would appreciate any suggestions that anyone, from our area, would have in order for us to do a better job.

As for the gentleman from Kansas. I am sure that there are enough problems there to keep you busy without worrying about Italy. We may be from the country but it doesn’t mean we are not competent to make good decisions for our city and area. You might be surprised what resources we have to make our own decisions. We also don’t need any additional “rumor spreaders”. We have enough of our own.

Sincerely,
Mark Stiles