Deena Winter: Talent Plus tells city it could have relocated
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Talent Plus could have used the allure of about 100 new jobs as a carrot, but it didn’t.
Not when the company was lobbying the parks advisory board, anyway.
That was then.
On Monday, when Talent Plus Director Sandy Maxwell lobbied the Lincoln City Council to approve the sale of 1.3 acres of parkland bordering a golf course so the company can build a parking lot, she leaned harder.
She mentioned that the Talent Plus founders made a “very deliberate decision to locate here” when they opened their 6-acre corporate headquarters overlooking Holmes Golf Course.
She did not speak of it before the park board, but Monday, she mentioned Talent Plus “had offers to move elsewhere” when it was looking for a home.
In fact, it considered locating in Dallas, Chicago and Colorado Springs, which tried to entice the company with inexpensive land.
But “we stayed,” she told the council. And the company bought 2.3 acres of parkland from the city in 2001, in addition to private land.
Now the company wants to build a second building and, eventually, perhaps double its work force of 135.
An attorney representing Talent Plus, Mark Hunzeker, also mentioned “it would have been very convenient for them to be elsewhere; to be in an airport hub city” because many of its clients are from out of town, and many are Fortune 500 companies.
The implications were clear.
But the council didn’t seem to need much convincing.
Some council members asked questions designed to drive home the value of the company and its jobs — questions about the taxable value of the Talent Plus campus and the kind of salaries it pays its employees ($50,000 average).
The council will vote on the sale Monday.
Bridge bids come in high
It’s going to cost more than expected to replace the Harris Overpass.
The lowest bid to build the bridge was about $18 million, 14 percent more than the city’s estimated $15.8 million. That bid came from Cramer & Associates.
Public works director Karl Fredrickson said after reviewing the bids, the city concluded the high price was based on several factors: a spike in steel and concrete costs, low city estimates on some items, an ambitious schedule and a difficult location.
Fredrickson said, based on those factors, the bid should be awarded and not rebid.
The O Street overpass, built in 1955, carries nearly 27,000 vehicles daily over the rail yards from Ninth to Third streets.
Casady redefines ‘moral turpitude’
Police Chief Tom Casady has tightened the guidelines that govern whether someone will get a peddler license in Lincoln or not.
The Journal Star reported in mid-June that only four of 15 Frosty Treats ice cream van drivers had the necessary licenses, and several had lengthy criminal records. Peddler licenses can be denied to applicants who have been convicted of a felony or committed a crime involving “moral turpitude” in the past decade.
That left Casady, who must sign off on peddler licenses, to define “moral turpitude.”
He had been using a law dictionary’s definition of it as “a breach of community standards of morality so grave as to be shocking to the conscience of the community.”
After the Frosty Treats story, he began using a new definition, when an attorney told him the bar association generally considers a crime of moral turpitude to include anything involving honesty or integrity.
In other words, the crime doesn’t have to be so shocking.
His new definition has led to more denials and more appeals, although the numbers are still small, he said.
Cook continues War on Paper
Councilman Jonathan Cook has long tried to train city employees to go paperless, but his War on Paper has evolved into a War on Pictures of the Paper.
The computer software developer said a recent weekly council “packet” of background information was 26 megabytes.
Instead of sending an electronic version of the original document (a PDF file), he said city employees often print it to paper, scan the paper and send a picture of the piece of paper.
Employees should send them as PDF files, he said, which would take up less space, look better, be searchable and consume no paper.
Scanned documents are still wasting paper, he said.
“Every city computer should have a PDF function,” he said. “If I had my way, there’d be a lock on the scanners so that no one could do this without permission.”
Want to film in Lincoln?
The city’s Web site is a treasure-trove of information and oddities.
Take this: Click your way to the mayor’s office, and one of the categories that pops up beside Mayor Chris Beutler’s photo is “Filming in Lincoln.”
Click again, and it says “Interested in filming in Lincoln? Call the mayor’s office … and ask for the Film Office.”
Film office?
Lincoln has a film office?
The mayor’s office receptionist didn’t know Lincoln had one either.
Diane Gonzolas, who handles press for the city and mayor, said the city doesn’t have a film office with a budget but does coordinate with the state film office. She said the Web site blurb is mainly intended to route people to the people who can help facilitate filmmaking by closing streets, for example.
She said she was changing the Web site to say “film office contact.”
Footnote to bridge story
Here’s a guest column contribution from Journal Star reporter Algis Laukaitis:
In a story last week about the new P Street bridge, several readers pointed out this was not the first time the construction technique — building a bridge on land — was used in Nebraska.
The village of Decatur in northeast Nebraska received national notoriety in the 1950s, when a bridge was built on dry land about a quarter of a mile from the Missouri River. After the bridge was built, the river was rechanneled so it would flow under the bridge.
For a short time, the span was known as the bridge “that went nowhere because it lost its river,” according to information from the Nebraska Public Power District.
He said it
“I like taking advantage of the entire golf course, so I’ll play from over there.”
— Councilman Ken Svoboda, on a sliver of unused, dandelion-covered parkland bordering Holmes Golf Course the city is considering selling to Talent Plus for parking.
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.
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