In a blog entry I posted last week, I asked a hypothetical (and real) question.
Everybody knows it was immoral, unethical, and illegal to use a $1.00 Food Stamp Bill to go to a store and buy a $.07 cent pack of kool aid, keeping the $.93 cents, and then repeating the process over and over until you cobbled enough money in change to buy what you really wanted (cigarettes and alcohol) but what you could not purchase with food stamps. I saw people do this as a bagger when I worked at a local supermarket here in Pensacola in the 1980s. It was ridiculous but nobody stopped the practice so it continued.....
But what about a county using LOST funding to purchase a property for "economic development" purposes (specifically allowed under statute)--and then subsequently selling such a property and depositing the proceeds not back into the LOST fund (where uses are restricted) but to the general fund instead(which has more flexibility with respect to what can be purchased/how the funds can be utilized)? Nobody seemed to know for sure.
So I asked the question on Sunday--in writing. Now we have the answer, (see below). As I suspected, this shell game scheme cannot be done. Proceeds realized from the sale of property acquired with LOST funds must be deposited back into the same LOST fund from which such purchase funding originated. So to the developer that thinks we should sell the OLF 8 property for "what we have in it and use the money to take care of operating expenses"--as I told you in person Friday, that is not legal. see below.
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