Detroit is - as I have mentioned many times on this blog - a pension and healthcare management entity that performs shoddy services on the side. The taxpayers now work for the public sector unions, not the other way around. No taxpayer should be on the hook for a public employee that no longer works for them. Yet pensions do just that. It's high time to bury the pension fossil and do what the private sector does - give out defined contributions. Of course, that would eliminate the graft and the corruptocrats that run the D won't have any of it. I can't even begin to count the stories of corruption coming out of Detroit in regards to just the pension follies. This latest one from the Detroit Free Press is just another straw of hay in a big stack: Detroit pension fund spends $30 million to fix $1-million building. It's a follow-up piece to another that I had recently: Alabama Town's Failed Pension Is a Warning. Detroit Isn't Listening. From the current piece:
Glenn Reynolds stated yesterday that "Politicians will, whenever allowed, play and gamble with and just plain piss away other people's money because . . . that's what they do." Bureaucrats and even private-sector minions of politicians are infected with the exact same disease.
Of course he did - a timetable doesn't exist to recoup 3000% of the stated value. Other recent freep pieces on the scandal:Detroit's police and fire retirement fund has spent at least $30 million to renovate an office building overlooking Grand Circus Park that's now worth just more than $1 million, pension and city assessor's office records show.
A pension adviser managing the building at 28 W. Adams says it plans to sink another $1.4 million into the property next year.
Steve Morris, assistant professor of real estate finance at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, says the deal doesn't add up.
"I can't fathom how they could have spent that amount of money," Morris said. For what the pension fund paid, per square foot, to renovate the 1921 building, it could have built a "luxury marble high-rise with the latest technology."
The pension fund bought the building as an investment property, but operates its own offices out of City Hall. The investment is among a slew of deals that have led Detroit's two public pensions to report losses of more than $480 million since 2008.
Emery Matthews, chief investment officer for MayfieldGentry Realty Advisors, which the police and fire fund hired to manage the property in 2003, defended the renovations, saying it is "basically a brand-new building with historic character."
Despite a brutally competitive environment and tough economy, Matthews said he is optimistic the building has the potential to be a home run and make money for retirees. He declined to give a timetable.
- Risky bets cost Detroit pension funds $480 million since 2008
- Where the Detroit pension funds went wrong
- Earlier findings on Detroit's two public pensions
- Investigating Detroit's public pension boards
Glenn Reynolds stated yesterday that "Politicians will, whenever allowed, play and gamble with and just plain piss away other people's money because . . . that's what they do." Bureaucrats and even private-sector minions of politicians are infected with the exact same disease.
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