{"id":8892,"date":"2014-06-15T12:18:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-15T16:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/?p=8892"},"modified":"2014-06-15T12:27:04","modified_gmt":"2014-06-15T16:27:04","slug":"were-a-job-bust-trust-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/15\/were-a-job-bust-trust-us\/","title":{"rendered":"We&#8217;re a Job Bust. Trust us."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anytime that news is dumped out on Friday afternoon, it&#8217;s not going to be good news.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h4><a title=\"Who\u2019s #1? \u2013 Biggest Job Announcement Busts \u2013 Part #2\" href=\"http:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/30\/whos-1-biggest-job-announcement-busts-part-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">We called US Green Energy a Job Bust a long time ago&#8230;<\/a><\/h4>\n<p>This company got $1,600,000 in Free Money from the Tobacco Commission back in 2010 and promised well over 300 jobs. Nothing happened in the first year, but the company said it&#8217;s going to happen very soon. Nothing happened the next year, but the company said it&#8217;s going to happen very soon. Nothing happened in the year after that, but the company said it&#8217;s going to happen very soon. See the pattern here?<\/p>\n<p>Time&#8217;s Up! That buzzer that you heard was the end of the Free Money period from the Tobacco Commission. US Green Energy didn&#8217;t beat the clock, the clock beat them. Badly. Like the Harlem Globetrotters beat the Washington Generals. Like the chances of a non-country concert in the Harvest Jubilee concert series. Like Thomas Motley in a Danville City Council election. Yeah, that bad.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the city&#8217;s press release that was tossed out Friday afternoon&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/danville-va.gov\/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1759\" target=\"_blank\">Danville negotiates grant repayment for U.S. Green Energy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the Register &amp; Bee story on it&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.godanriver.com\/news\/danville\/danville-negotiates-grant-repayment-for-u-s-green-energy\/article_fe61d07a-f330-11e3-acfd-0017a43b2370.html\" target=\"_blank\">Danville negotiates grant repayment for U.S. Green Energy<\/a>. (Yes, it&#8217;s the same headline as the city&#8217;s press release. It was Friday, so I&#8217;m not going to mention how lazy-ass that was.)<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a faithful reader of SouthsideCentral, you&#8217;re probably ready for me to disembowel this entire thing. I&#8217;m not going to let you down. Bring on the Big Board.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>City Manager Joe King says &#8220;\u201cOfficials from U.S. Green Energy have assured us that the company will cover the full $1.6 million grant in the scheduled four-year period.\u201d &#8211; They also told the city, the Tobacco Commission, and everybody else that they were good for $30 million and 372 jobs. <a href=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/B7W4gk8.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Jeremy Stratton believed them enough to vouch for them and we know all of his economic development deals have succeeded. Isn&#8217;t that right, Mr. Chervik?<\/a>\u00a0 (Let&#8217;s see who gets that Caddyshack reference)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Company officials expect to receive a second cash infusion from overseas investors.&#8221; Yes. I expect to have the winning Powerball ticket as well. I&#8217;m pretty sure that this &#8220;second cash infusion&#8221; will never happen.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;They say international money lending regulations have kept the cash languishing in an overseas bank while the transfer goes through multiple reviews.&#8221; Riiiiiight. If this Mystery Cash was real, I could have sent it by Western Union $1000 at a time since 2010.<\/li>\n<li>An officer of the company bought the building, leased the building back to the company and used the cash proceeds to pay the first of four $400K payments. Remember this next year when the second $400K payment is due, because I&#8217;m betting it won&#8217;t be paid by US Green Energy.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"UPDATED: Danville City Council \u2013 LIVE! (6\/3\/2014)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/03\/danville-city-council-live-632014\/\" target=\"_blank\">This is the company that was in front of City Council less than two weeks ago complaining about their $450 electric bill<\/a>. If their electric bill is $450 with nothing going on there, imagine what it would be with real production going on. They&#8217;ll need a lot of this Mystery Cash to pay that bill. It&#8217;s not like they have any solar energy panels to use for electricity there.<\/li>\n<li>Joe King: &#8220;The majority of small businesses fail within the first five years. It\u2019s not unusual to have a new start up company experience some tough times getting fully functional.\u201d &#8211; Wow. This is some really good spin because the majority of small business don&#8217;t get a million dollars of Free Money that&#8217;s guaranteed by the City of Danville (Brad Mainland and Web Parts not included). This is the same type of &#8220;Everything&#8217;s Going To Be Fine&#8221; talk we got a few months ago about the death spiral of the GOK Chinese furniture company. It&#8217;s horsecrap.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The city wants you to believe that the taxpayers aren&#8217;t going to be on the hook for the rest of the Tobacco Commission money. That&#8217;s understandable because they don&#8217;t want to feel the sting of the public outrage. The city also doesn&#8217;t want to publicize the fact that the Jeremy Stratton-led era of economic development has been a string of Job Busts and that more situations like that are going to be coming up. When Ecomnets turned out to be a Job Bust, at least they had the money to repay the Free Money that they got. US Green Energy doesn&#8217;t and they&#8217;re probably not ever going to.<\/p>\n<p>This is a Job Bust disaster that&#8217;s been all wrapped up in pretty paper with a sweet bow on top. Inside the package, we&#8217;re going to find out that this is not anywhere close to what the city is trying to make you think it is. The city is now trusting a company that&#8217;s already broken every promise. It&#8217;s just not going to work out and the taxpayers are going to end up paying for this Job Bust.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s all remember this article when it comes time to make Payment #2 on this bill.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"8644\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/13\/breakdown-danville-school-board-election\/sclogo\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg?fit=120%2C120&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"120,120\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"sclogo\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg?fit=120%2C120&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8644\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg?resize=120%2C120\" alt=\"sclogo\" width=\"120\" height=\"120\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anytime that news is dumped out on Friday afternoon, it&#8217;s not going to be good news.<\/p>\n<p> [&#8230;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,58,20,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-businesscentral","category-danville","category-newscentral","category-opinioncentral","odd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwqFk-2jq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8922,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/18\/the-us-green-energy-tobacco-commission-agreement\/","url_meta":{"origin":8892,"position":0},"title":"The US Green Energy &#8211; Tobacco Commission Agreement","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"June 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Since we've been covering the US Green Energy Job Bust and the news that Danville will have to repay the grant money if the company can't, we thought our readers would like to see what the agreement actually looked like. And here you go... Here at SouthsideCentral, we live to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BusinessCentral&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BusinessCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/businesscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"sclogo","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9080,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/29\/softball-practice-with-us-green-energy\/","url_meta":{"origin":8892,"position":1},"title":"Softball Practice With US Green Energy","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"June 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Unchallenged horsecrap is horsecrap. Stop me if you've heard these lines before... Despite woes, company pushes forward with new energy This sounds remarkably like when Brad Mainland (The Web Parts Job Bust guy) took a Register & Bee reporter to his new building and talked about his grandiose plans that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BusinessCentral&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BusinessCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/businesscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"sclogo","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8723,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/02\/happy-trails-virdia\/","url_meta":{"origin":8892,"position":2},"title":"UPDATED: Happy Trails, Virdia!","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"June 2, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Editor's Note: I've retracted the part of the article that says Virdia was the recipient of Free Money. The SENTEC building was built using Tobacco Commission money. - BruceH Green Energy. Turning biomass into something useful. Lots of Free Government Money. Wow, I didn't see this Job Bust coming. (Actually,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BusinessCentral&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BusinessCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/businesscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"virdiabuilding","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/virdiabuilding.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/virdiabuilding.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/virdiabuilding.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":12840,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2015\/05\/28\/allergease-job-bust-but-not-so-fast\/","url_meta":{"origin":8892,"position":3},"title":"AllergEase: Job Bust! (But Not So Fast&#8230;)","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"May 28, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Another Job Bust! AllergEase has left town! Their phone has been disconnected! The sky is falling! However, this could be a case of \"Not so fast, my friends!\" Next Tuesday night's Danville City Council agenda was released yesterday and local media swarmed on this... CL- 1151 New Business Item #:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BusinessCentral&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BusinessCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/businesscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"sclogo","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/sclogo.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7798,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/30\/whos-1-biggest-job-announcement-busts-part-3\/","url_meta":{"origin":8892,"position":4},"title":"Who&#8217;s #1? &#8211; Biggest Job Announcement Busts &#8211; Part #3","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"June 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"We're up to the biggest two Job Busts in the area. We've covered a bunch of them in Part #1 and Part #2 but it's time to finish the list and find out Who's #1! Let's start off with a #2 that almost made the top of the list... #2:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BusinessCentral&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BusinessCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/businesscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11755,"url":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/2015\/01\/11\/closed-for-the-season-or-for-good\/","url_meta":{"origin":8892,"position":5},"title":"Closed For The Season (or for good?)","author":"SouthsideCentral","date":"January 11, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"US Green Energy has \"temporarily shutdown\" due to \"high electric costs\". It's a lot easier to blame something else, folks. Power bills blamed on temporary shut down (Register & Bee article, paywall may apply unless you break through it) Bob Bennett just served up a crock of horsecrap and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BusinessCentral&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BusinessCentral","link":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/category\/businesscentral\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/J16zsLC.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/J16zsLC.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/i.imgur.com\/J16zsLC.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8894,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892\/revisions\/8894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southsidecentral.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}