Comments on: Spartanburg City Council ‘09: District 4 Candidate Thomas Belenchia

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:36:08 +0000

On the contrary, the business owners I’ve talked to about an incubator are very supportive of the idea. They’ve mentioned how helpful it would have been to them if they’d had access to some of the resources available in an incubation program. Plus, an incubator would bring more business traffic downtown.

So thanks for speaking on behalf of “every business owner.”

By: Sylvie Galloway

Sylvie Galloway — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:17:21 +0000

Nicely done Chris. Those were some good questions as well. Open ended yet phrased to help a candidate state just how they felt on these particular issues.

By: camelmike

camelmike — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:24:14 +0000

“Whether the city is the best vehicle to support the incubator centers, I donâ€™t know that answer. I do believe that incubator centers should be privately capitalized centers. I donâ€™t think that we should be putting taxpayersâ€™ money to support incubator centers. I think that if thereâ€™s a demand for it, the free-market will fill that demand.”

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Finally someone says what every business owner knows.

Business Incubators? Save them for quail eggs.

Nonsense.

By: Will

Will — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:30:55 +0000

Interesting. On the one hand, Mr. Belenchia repeatedly trumpets the arch-conservative “Government is bad, let’s get out of the way and let the free market sort things out and everything will be groovy” line, yet on the other hand he applauds things like the Chapman Center and SCC’s move downtown. Neither one of those things happen without the big, bad government allocating resources.

He talks about small businesses creating jobs, and I agree. Take RJ Rockers, for instance. Certainly qualifies as a small business, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be great for the city not only for the people it employs but also for the development and spark it will bring to that end of downtown.

Wonder if that move downtown would ever have happened if the kind of philosophy Mr. Belenchia espouses held sway with our city leadership, since Rockers received city incentives. Belenchia seems to say here, with his “let the free market dictate what happens” talk, that he doesn’t think government should be doing stuff like that.

And then there are his statements about wanting to see cost-benefit studies before he decides whether or not the city should support anything. Well, first, that would be a whole lot of time and money spent on studies and reports. (See: tax-funded city personnel.) Second of all, I wonder where he would draw the line? Just what kind of ROI must a city service produce for him to support it? Here, he says the threshold for arts funding would be a 2:1 return on investment. Wow. Considering there are literally hundreds of actual businesses in our community that function on profit margins in the single digits, Mr. Belenchia seems to have an expectation that is wildly out of whack.

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:48:37 +0000

Wow. Food for the lions.

All I have to say right now is that fundamentally businesses operate differently than governments. Governments pool the resources and energies of the people in order to benefit the society as a whole in ways that the market can’t otherwise fulfill. City leaders aren’t investors hoping to earn a profit for the city.