City Council Candidate Statements - Voigts

We’re covering the Candidate statements, and we started with Kathy McCullough who is the longest serving member of the Council. Next in tenure is Scott Voigts.

We noted a few weeks ago that Voigts failed to deliver on almost every promise he made in 2010, and often he did the opposite of what he promised to do. So it’s hard to take seriously someone who is a proven liar. Nonetheless, in the interests of covering all the candidates, here’s my take on Voigts’ statement.

· He claims the City added “568 new businesses”

What he isn’t telling you is how many businesses the City lost.

In fact, all economic forecasts show that Lake Forest sales tax revenue for the next few years will grow at only half the rate of our neighbors. All you have to do is drive around the city and you see all the “For Lease” and “For Rent” signs.

Part of the reason Lake Forest has done so poorly is that we are spending less than 2% of our $35,000,000 annual budget on people and businesses in the City. When Voigts took office the figure was closer to 5%. We are now at an all-time low, and Voigts consistently refuses to do anything about it.

· He claims the he has been responsible for “reducing our unemployment rate to 3.1%”

Nonsense. Unemployment rates have dropped everywhere in the past 4 years, and little of that has to do with City spending.

In fact, Voigts and the rest of the Council have a policy of not hiring people who live in Lake Forest. Almost all the highly paid staff on the City payroll live in other cities.

As noted above, Voigts has done nothing to spend more of the City’s $35,000,000 on people and businesses here in Lake Forest. In fact he recently voted to take away the biggest contract with a local business (the PM Group) and spend the money elsewhere.

· He claims that we are “building our new 86 acre sports park”

That’s true, but it has nothing to do with Voigts.

The plans and the money to build the new sports park we completed before Voigts took office, and we can thank previous Council members Dixon, Herzog, Tettemer, and Rudolph for their work on this project.

· He claims he represents “…conservative, pro-business principles…”

Yet he voted so many times to waste taxpayer money

Voigts voted to give himself and Council and Planning Commission members expensive iPads when they could have used much less expensive tablets and saved thousands of dollars (Dec 17, 2013). Moreover, he voted to continue receiving paper copies of agendas, meaning that any savings from using iPads would be eliminated.

Then he voted for the City to spend $14K per year so that he and his fellow Council members didn’t have to file paper copies of FPPC forms, a time saver for him, but a money spender for the City (Jan 7, 2014). Does that sound like a “conservative”?

He voted bonuses to the City Manager, a man who earns well over $300,000 a year and is one of the highest paid persons in the County, with only a meagre record of achievement.

He voted to suspend the oversight reviews by the Council (Feb 4, 2014).

He voted several times to give contacts to companies without any competitive bids (June 17, 2014). What kind of a conservative is that?

BOTTOM LINE - Voigts’ list of achievements is meagre and his list of broken promises is endless. He ushered in an era of perceived corruption, cronyism, and incompetence unmatched in the City’s history. Time to show him the door.

ABOUT JIM GARDNER

Dr. Jim Gardner is running for City Council in Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. Or you can read one of the 1,000+ articles he’s written for The Patch in the past few years. Click on his name underneath the title of the article and that will take you to his bio page where his previous articles can be accessed.