From Whitewater’s city manager and acting Community Development Association director comes word of a second public loan for DR Plastics. To follow the agendas, proceedings, and minutes of the CDA was to see this a mile away —
CDA Approves Business Development Loan to DR Plastics
The Community Development Authority (CDA) this week approved a business development loan for DR Plastics Inc., located on Commercial Avenue in the Whitewater Business Park. The loan, which is for $150,000, will allow the firm to construct its third converting machine at its Whitewater facility and eight additional employees will be hired as a result of the firm’s increased production capability.DR Plastics received a similar CDA business loan in early 2011 to assist with the purchase of its first two converting machines here in Whitewater. That loan has subsequently been repaid by the company.
One public loan last year, another one for the same company this year.
The last loan was a mistake; this one is worse. Even if one thought the applicant was worthy before, a second loan should either have come from the private market or not at all. Use of public money gives this applicant more favorable terms than those of a bank. Worse, the applicant – for all its supposed prior success – still seeks (or needs) public money rather than that of a conventional, private lender.
For a critique of the last loan, see Spoken and Unspoken.
It’s just a measure of the confusion in the city manager-acting director’s thinking that he touts this second loan as an accomplishment in his 2.17.12 Weekly Report.
If anyone, then new applicants would have been better. Lack of suitable new applicants doesn’t justify lending to prior ones; the lack calls, instead, for a more diligent selection effort.