UAEWI Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers Initiative

On behalf of and as workers, taxpayers, and citizens; the Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers Initiative of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council respectfully submits the following questions about economic development policies and practices.

 

The job market, the tax base, and now governmental services are collapsing. If government intends to continue funding economic development programs with the expressed goal of creating and retaining jobs as well as increasing and maintaining the tax base, a review is necessary. Our tax dollars spent through economic development programs in the expressed of jobs must be transparent, accountable, and includes us as active participants. In our name and with our tax dollars, our government can not make us objects in someone else's economy.

 

How do you define economic development?

How do your measure success?

What economic development appropriations do you fund?

What economic development mechanisms do you administer?

Who reviews economic development policies?

Who audits economic development spending?

Who are your economic development policy makers?

What are the direct and indirect administrative costs?

When and where do they meet?

Can we have access to their records so we can assess their effectiveness?

Do you employ a cost benefit analysis?

What measures are in place to maintain community wage and job standards?

What direct job creation programs do you oversee?

What is the per job cost for job creation and analysis?

Is there an ethics policy regarding recipients of economic development, their agents, and public policy and decision makers?

What is the recidivism policy for economic development funds?

Is there a policy to require repayment of economic development moneys by recipients that are actively pursuing relocation plans?

Do you consider job creation and retention a public utility?

As investors of the common wealth, how is economic development performance measured, reported, and verified individually and in aggregate?

How is economic development performance supervised?

What first amendment, whistle-blower, and Sarbanes-Oxley protections do you afford employees of economic development recipients?

Do you monitor executive bonuses for economic development recipients?