Angel Mckinney

You're all dogging on Dan Hibma, but whether he's involved in the grandville castle or not, that's part of the solution. The "free market" is addressing things. That's 552 new homes on the market. Yeah, it's hideous and an eyesore and Dan Hibma is shady, but those are 552 brand new homes, starting at $775 a month. 2BR at $1300 a month. The market needs more housing, and it's being built feverishly. The more housing comes on the market, the more prices will come down. It's absurd to say that the market isn't addressing the problem. And how precisely was the land bank addressing this? There's *no information whatsoever* on the web site regarding sales prices of houses it has rehabbed or built. I know a lot of people out there rehabbing like crazy and providing nice homes to people with lower incomes. Lots. They just don't get headlines and subsidies. It's happening and it takes time.

My point here is that the Co The rest is mostly whataboutism. The land bank was extremely non-transparent. Virtually nothing about its operations are on the web site. This was something the county commission committees pointed out over and over and nothing was done. Of course when we see a government entity operating with impunity (as your statement above shows, this was an organizational value), people start to question it. The very entity that authorized the land bank (the county comission) started questioning things. Multiple times. You ignored them. Completely. What do you expect? Frankly, it's very arrogant. Ken Parrish's interview on Mlive was the same. Very arrogant and dismissive of the county commission. Maybe it was the county commission's error in not specifically building the blight issue into the intergovernmental agreement, but EVERYONE who was paying attention at the time was told it was about addressing blight. Your own statements to the Grand Rapids business journal validate this: https://www.grbj.com/articles/76889-kclba-views-local-banks-as-vital-to-its-operation And I remember seeing the presentation made to the county commission when the land bank was approved. Blight was the thread that ran through the entire thing. You and Parrish now seem to want to pretend that didn't happen.

That's highly misleading. While the county doesn't appropriate general fund money to the land bank, the KCLBA receives 50% of the property taxes from every property it sells for five years. So you get the money before the county does, along with money from every other entity that would otherwise get it... cities, townships, library districts, schools, etc. $340,000 this year alone (as of November, according to your financials, and over $400,000 in 2017). And you don't in any way break down on your web site which entities you're preemptively getting that money from, so we have no clear idea which local governments are being impacted and by how much.