The Facade, the Fraud, and the Fake

[XLFD]

In the article, "The MacLean Makeover Mystery Deepens" and the links it has to prior articles, we reviewed briefly but in detail the corrupted history of the property known as "102 West Ludington Avenue" where the owners, David and Kathy MacLean (aka KDMAC LLC) defrauded the state out of money for rental rehabilitation grants before they had title to the property, and afterwards when they failed to use it for low income rental housing for the period they needed to when they admitted so in a fraudulent grant application for façade grants made last year. 

Kathy MacLean has been President of the Ludington and Scottville Area Chamber of Commerce and has used her other station as treasurer of the Downtown Ludington Board (Ludington's DDA) to great advantage, allowing many thousands of dollars of public money to funnel over to the chamber each year by allowing the DDA to utilize her staff, and then calling for increases in February 2014. 

I attended that meeting, it was odd seeing a public agency's treasurer represent and petition for the chamber to raise the DDA's expenditures 30% on a service she herself provided.  She at least had the dignity to miss the next month's meeting when it was voted on and passed. 

But the façade grant for her property was apparently approved by the state after it was amended to be mostly factual, and the work is being done at 102 W. Ludington Avenue.  Hopefully, all that activity is not bothering the three tenants of the upstairs of which the grant application maintained are not there. 

This is a recent picture of the work being done as you read this:

So was there any surprise that complicit Community Development Director Heather Tykoski was repaid for her efforts in overlooking MacLean's fallacious applications to MSHDA at least twice by being honored by the local Chamber of Commerce for her greatness, by being named as one of the area's Future Five in this year's self-promoting awards that area media adore. 

"We are currently restoring two more facades in our Downtown area... working on implementing a community plan for the West End" she rattles off among her other supplicating accomplishments.  She along with three of the other 'future five' are folks were not even in this neck of the woods ten years ago; quite an indictment of the chamber appreciating our own youngsters who decide to stay or move back here.

Coincidentally, the one future five member who has been here the majority of her life, Jen Tooman, enjoys another distinction.  She is the Marketing & Communications Manager of which the City's DDA (through their treasurer, the chamber's president) pays $15,600 per year to the chamber of commerce to help with their various schemes of spending all that public money the DDA receives each year through property taxes and tax increment financing. 

What?!  The chamber of commerce honors their own employee without acknowledging that she is their employee too?  Such an omission is small potatoes for this corrupted crew of community crumb cakes.

[Jasper]

So where does all these grant monies come from? Never understood......

[XLFD]

Good question, I had to look it up to be sure myself.  Michigan state grants are economic aid issued by the Michigan government out of the general state revenue. A state grant is an award of financial assistance from a state agency to a recipient to carry out a public purpose of support or stimulation authorized by a law of the State of Michigan.

You may wonder, like I do, how supplying public money for maintaining the outside of a private business or installing apartments in a private business has a 'public purpose'.  This state and other states, like the City of Ludington, has their own flawed ideas of how to fight blight and the deterioration of downtown areas.  These ideas get exploited by people like the MacLeans and the Jacobsons (the prospective developers of the bowling alley block) who use them for their own financial benefit at the expense of everyone else.  This creates an uneven playing field for the rest of the community (the exploited), who wind up indirectly paying the bill for these projects.

[Jasper]

So why do these grant funds not fix the roads instead of all this bs?

[XLFD]

It doesn't make sense if you believe, like me, that those taxes and fees you pay to your government should be used strictly for public purposes.  Somewhere along the way politicians, bureaucrats, and those who profit from government handouts changed the rules.  They learned to use the system and the media to promote such aberrations as good for all, when they are anything but.  The system expands, gets more powerful, while your freedoms and pocketbook contracts further.

[shinblind]

Add to that the demise of the middle class.

There is a new urban gentry attempting to rise in this Country. They have none of the attributes that other generations used to be upwardly mobile except for the ability to manipulate funds from the Government and control the media.  Indeed it is to their advantage if the current middle class is diminished in both wealth and Constitutional Rights in order to be easier to manipulate and control.

A free, prosperous, educated and upwardly mobile middle class is their enemy.  Their ideal is a burgeoning  lower class, a few tradesmen for a middle class, and a new nobility to run things. We are moving back to Feudal times.

[Brad]

Seems to be another fakade do be done... Trailhead Bike Shop...

Per H Tykoski comment today on FB Vanishing Ludington... "Does anyone have pictures of the Trailhead building when it was first built. We are looking for it for a potential facade restoration program".

More grant money for Tykoski and DDA....

[jfc123]

I don't have any, but I do have several of the PM Bayou prior to the 2008 storm. No one around it caused it as reported by the DEQ.  Why wont they look into restoring it? They can bring their offers for the property if that is what they want, sad because those around and near there are a big reason there is a downtown. I do believe in karma! It could be a very beautiful and protected area for boating and condos, maybe why Washington Bridge was raised?

[XLFD]

jfc, there will never be any façade money made available to the PM Bayou area or even the Fourth Ward business district-- at least until, or if, the area does get bought out for public marinas and public-private development.  The Community Development Director has forgotten that this area could be developed too, that's why the downtown sees over a $100,000 being invested into downtown events and improvements each year, while you only see increased tax rates as your reward.

Thanks for the heads up on the latest quest for CDD administrative fees for Heather, Brad.