Tag: Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

Typically, a master planned community (mpc). . .

 . . . . is on a large plot of land where a developer offers an array of amenities, including golf courses, restaurants, shops, miles of hiking trails, parks, community events, and more;  just about everything you need within a community. The Forestbrook Estates – a City of Paris local partner – claims to be a MPC.

Whether or not it is, as claimed, a mpc, the smell of the selling sizzle covers up the fact that local taxpayers, who have paid the bills for years, are now on the hook for an estimated $20 million to cover the developer’s cost.

Why?

 

There’s no guarantee it will pay . . . .

. . . and $20 million is over one-third of the current city budget. IF its such a good deal, why do the developers need the Paris taxpayers to guarantee them a profit?

The major draw of a master planned community is that you can walk from your home to the gym, shoot a round of golf, grab a drink at the clubhouse, play at the park, take your kids to school, all available for residents and are kept up-to-date by funds collected by a homeowners association (HOA). 

IF there’s no HOA, will taxpayers – who seems to be stuck paying for everything else – be stuck with maintaining the streets, hauling off trash, repairing water and sewer leaks, and other such day-by-day expenses? And surprising us all by getting rid of litter?

The reported first phase of the nearly 200-acres of the Forestbrook development will consist of 87 of the 471 residential lots. This doesn’t seem to leave much room for playgrounds, schools, gyms, golf, clubhouses, parks, and all the promised related retail and commercial development; plus, the rights-of-way for utilities and streets, drainage, etc. 

The Paris Texas Chamber doesn’t know if a HOA is in the plans, nor do we have the least idea about what the proposed development will actually offer or who are the developers. We do know, however, that the endeavor itself is not as important as the centuries-old concept for selling democratic socialism – a private-public partnership, which is an insult to to the American Idea of self-responsibility and the need for accountability of one’s personal actions.

 

Private-public partnerships are not how you limit government.

IF the City of Paris cannot or will not guarantee every citizens’ debt, why is it guaranteeing the debt of a selected few based on Happy Talk promises and the only collateral being the taxpayer’s guarantee?

Where does the city, and government in general, get the right to pick and choose economic winners?

Its so much the key question that we don’t even understand those individuals who believe that robbing Pete to pay Paul is a good idea – unless they’re Paul.

Do banks even make development loans anymore? If not, why not? IF they can’t make community development loans, why are they needed?  (Community development is economic development, and consumer loans only get people deeper into personal debt.) So, what purpose do banks now fill – other than paying a little bit of interest on CDs in order to loan the  money at a higher interest rate to some government-guaranteed “too big to fail” Big Business? 

Isn’t government basically guaranteeing the success of banks?

Why are taxpayers forced to guarantee some developer’s debt?

 

Forced compliance is destroying the 13th Amendment of the Constitution . . . .

. . . . and the bad decisions keep coming: As the Paris Chamber warned years ago, thanks to idiots in the Texas legislature, anything can now be economic development. 

The City of Paris has extended its partnership with Palma Holdings, LLC; subsidizing “a residential 5 in 5 Housing Infill Development program” that the city calls economic development. Basically, its low-income single-family instant-slum housing offered at an estimated $200,000 sales price. Five or more have been built with no reported sales, but ten more were recently approved for construction.

Unfortunately, a $200,000 home is not affordable for most low-income families, but as taxpayer subsidized Section 8 housing, it can become a long-time profit center for a private developer. 

It all makes some wonder about sanity.     

 

 

 

The City of Paris needs a HomeOwners Association

IF Paris, which once was “The North Star of Texas” really wants – as it claims – to ‘clean up Paris’, it should form a Homeowners Association (HOA), which can take rule enforcement to the next level.

A HOA is needed, as the city will not enforce ordinances concerning litter, grass and weeds, boats and RVs, inoperable vehicles, fences, and yards full of unsightly (strange and ugly) junk. The mystery being that if the city will not enforce ordinances, why have them?

If we’re not using the ones we have, why not turn them over to a HOA for enforcement?

Uh … forget about the “strange and ugly” bit – otherwise, the population may be greatly reduced. And one or two of our Paris Chamber’s Directors would be among the first to be forced to vacate not just Paris, but the NE Texas vicinity.

So let that sleeping dog lie . . . But there should be ordinances enforced about bathing; at least, once a month.

Flowerbeds won’t regulate themselves, and we don’t want to get started on those trash cans left out overnight.

IF the city is going to do as it has promised over recent decades, it needs to start a HOA – one that can use military precision, when and if necessary. After these years of unenforced ordinances, Paris needs to aim for a disciplined, picture-perfect community.

Instead of giving taxpayer’s money away, the PEDC ought to fund the HOA effort.

By a big majority, this chamber’s directors voted to recommend asking that HOA employees don fatigues, a utility belt with handcuffs, a bug zapper, a firearm, a ballistic vest, breath mints, bean-o, and an approach to every violation with a “take no prisoners” attitude. (See below poster of enforcer-type and equipment.) To assure a resounding success, this is likely the only road over the next three years.

IF HomeOwners are trembling at just the thought, good – so be it.

In transparency, one of older Directors, voting against the HOA, said he, “can see a time that if I just forgot to mow for a couple of days, I’d be doing push-ups in my front yard, and I cannot do push-ups anymore.”

We assured him that while residents might scramble to comply, praying their grass grows no higher than the regulation three inches, they would be building new muscles saluting their new governmental unit.

Some folks are now saying that instead of having more government, they would rather do the cleanup work themselves.

They’ve paid taxes for 25 to 50-years or longer to allow city councils and management to litter it up.

You really have to appreciate the rate of return when investing in government.

This is, of course, a continuing development of a story that is a half-century in the making.

                                                    Return to the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce 

Links:

Incentivizing

You Don’t Stiff Your Customers

A Free Press

 

Ron White declared, “You can’t fix stupid.” 

The comedian had to come up with that line somehow from some thing or some place. 

He’s made a lot of stops along the way. 

The only thing you can know for sure is that if he did stop in Paris, Texas, he wasn’t here long.

And while Paris may not be IQ city, it is, however, a brilliant place compared to, say, California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Chicago, or Nutland, D. C. 

Or, Austin, Texas  –  even if the Legislature is not in session.

Some say you can also add-in the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce, where the bulb glows dim most days. (Some of our worst friends and best enemies usually say that that we’re so dim that even on a bright day at high noon we think its midnight and there are no stars at all).

We, of course, know of no reason why some people inside the city limits should be so unkind.

Lamar County citizens –

 – who don’t live inside the Paris city limits, demonstrate that they are smarter than most of the in-city residents. The reason is that they don’t breathe the same air. There is some concern about those who do live close-in, however, as a few of them don’t know how to drive either.

Most folks believe that the community of Paris was built on a small hill, the highest elevation in Lamar County. But its not a hill; its just two or three small swellings of the earth over the top of a few large underground caverns. These are where the stupidity goes when one of our citizens die.

These caves contain a tremendous volume of stupidity.

Over the years, the expanding pressure has forced cracks to form between the caverns and up to the surface ground. These cracks release a constant supply of stupidity into the air inside the city limits, which create problems for residents, as well as for residential and business foundations.

Geologists say the largest cracks seems to be under City Hall and what used to be the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce.

Once you breathe in stupidity it lodges in the mind and cannot escape until the body kicks the final bucket, and then the stupidity stuffs seeps down into these caverns and it’s recycling time again.

Its a cycle that’s been going on for the last 75-or so years.

As fumes escape thru the cracks, by the time a new baby is seven months old it has breathed in enough stupidity to last the rest of its life. It takes an adult newcomer who moves here about three years or so, depending on how smart they were when they first got here. They show signs, that they’ve adapted to citizenship and love Paris, by beginning to litter, letting weeds grow, parking their vehicles in the front yard, and storing their junk along the side of their house and the overflow in the back yard.

After a decade or so, you can’t tell an oldtimer from a newcomer.

Old timers in Paris, who have accepted their fate, bet on how long it takes one of the new ones to show the second sign of increasing stupidity; the first sign being they obviously weren’t too smart or they wouldn’t have moved here.

But not as much money is changing hands on bets as it once did. Over the last two decades, not too many of the newcomers chose Paris. Instead, they settled in Lamar County to getaway from the stale smell of high humidity stupidity.

Amounts that city residents don’t inhale escape; drift off, and eventually create active members of the new Socialist-Democrat Party. That’s why it is growing so fast.

All this proves that not only White was right (you can’t fix stupidity), but it also proves you cannot contain it, either.

return to The Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

 

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