MONDAY NIGHT COUNCIL MEETING PLUS TRUMP

As I noted I shall not attend Monday’s night Council meeting which is being held on the night of the second most important Jewish religious holy day.

I have scanned the agenda and with the exception of Resolution G to increase the award of a contract with Mitchel Humphry Software from $169800.00 to $208,660.00 which is a 23% increase.

Why there are now 40 licensed users instead of the original 25 is not clarified in any documentation Once again there is a resolution authorizing payment to Remington & Vernick an additional $43735.00 for “change order 1 contract #2.” An explanation should be appreciated.

Has anyone made a study to see if an in house engineer would be more cost effective than outsourcing?

Perhaps the revelation that Trump may not have paid any income taxes from 1995 is why he will not reveal his taxes. According to Allan Sloan in Sunday's Washington Post"

By Allan Sloan October 2 at 4:22 PM

Despite what Donald Trump says, we really can learn a lot from his tax returns — even from the partial ones made public by The New York Times.
The major takeaway from the three pages of Trump’s 1995 returns that the Times made public is that Trump is right when he says the system is rigged. What he doesn’t say is that it’s rigged in his favor, and in the favor of people like him — and against regular people, those of us who earn money, pay income tax on it, and financially support the country in which we live.
To keep things relatively simple, I’m telling you what I see in Trump’s returns, based on my decades of experience parsing financial filings. I will try not to get bogged down in numbers and technicalities.
Sure, the $900 million-plus of losses reported by the New York Times — losses that could be used to offset income for a total of 18 years—are totally shocking. Legal, yes. But shocking.
But there’s something I consider even more shocking — although it involves a much smaller number.

By my read of the Trump tax return published by the New York Times, he would have been tax-free because of a $15,818,562 loss reported on Line 11 of the return under “Rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” It looks to me that this loss reflects the outrageous, special tax break that real estate developers that people like Trump can get, but that the rest of us can’t.

To give you the brief version, people who qualify as real estate developers or managers can use depreciation deductions to offset non-real estate income. But people who don’t qualify for this special treatment can’t do that. (For full details, ask a tax expert about Section 469 of the tax code.)

Now, to the $909 million loss reported by the New York Times — which vastly exceeds any cash losses that Trump would have suffered in the collapse of his casino-hotel-airline empire, which fell apart in the early 1990s and resulted in four bankruptcies. (He had two more bankruptcies, in 2004 and 2009, from a publicly-traded company in which he was the primary shareholder.)

The Trump people are trying to counter that bad information by stating the amount of real estate taxes "he" has paid over those years. Without question this is a typical Trump misstatement. Those taxes were paid by the individual "corporation" owning the property.