Two years, $400,000 in your pocket. This right after you “make a mistake” in tearing down part of a historic building and get an additional $215,000 handed to you on a demolition contract. Only in Dayton Ohio can someone be so lucky so often.

It helps when you donate to the right people in politics, for a long time.

The Five Rivers MetroParks plans to use a $1 million Clean Ohio grant toward the purchase and cleanup of the defunct Larch Tree Golf Course.

That is, if the parks organization carries out the purchase option agreement it signed with owner of the old golf course, Bearcreek Farms, Inc. in Dayton, in February….

Five Rivers would like to turn Larch Tree, an 18-hole golf course property, into conservation land and make it a part of the 360-acre Great Miami Wetland Mitigation Bank conservation area that sits adjacent to the golf course, according to Dave Nolin, Five Rivers director of Conservation….

Montgomery County Auditor’s records show that Bearcreek Farms, Inc. took the old golf course from Steve R. Rauch in June of 2012, the same year the golf course closed due to lack of business. However, Rauch is listed as the incorporator for Bearcreek Farms for records filed in the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.

Rauch bought the property for $600,000 from Financial Services, Inc. in April of 2012.

via Five Rivers MetroParks sets sights on property.

And the old line of “well, we’re using federal dollars to do it” doesn’t cut it- those “Federal dollars” are our tax dollars too. Insider information is being passed to people in advance of government purchases- or, government employees are being told about “opportunities”- you buy this property for this much- and they go ahead and do it. Much like the botched land purchase by the South Transfer Station:

Montgomery County last year paid $475,000 for a parcel of land that sold for $70,000 five months earlier, a price jump the county blames on botched communications with its real estate broker.

The parcel at the northeast corner of Springboro Pike and Cardington Road had been targeted by the county for years yet was snapped up by a newly formed company that then resold it to the county in September 2013 for nearly seven times the price paid the previous March.

via Botched land deal blamed on mixup | www.mydaytondailynews.com.

Of course, both these deals are chump change compared to the raping the citizens of Dayton took on the bad deal with IRG at the Dayton Airport- where the city gave the “developer” a check for $3.5 million and the rights to scrap the assets of the former Emery Air Freight building that was on a guaranteed lease to UPS until 2019. It’s been over three years on that debacle and IRG hasn’t brought any jobs to the site, it now sits unkempt- missing 4 emergency diesel generators, a huge stainless steel fuel farm, a multi-million dollar automated sorting and conveyor system and who knows what else. The term of the deal was 3 years- and no one has demanded performance or the property back.

Anyone who wonders why donors would hand a mediocre city commissioner half a million dollars to run for Mayor- a job that pays $45K a year, should look at deals like this and realize that this is just tithing to the “monarchy of Montgomery County”- the network of mostly democratic office holders who have been taking care of the “Friends and Family” for years- selling out the citizens left and right.

If you wonder how the Arcade – a project we taxpayers put millions into, ended up being sold to Tom Danis for $36K plus a check to former Police Chief Tyree Broomfield for $100,000 to resign.

If you wonder who owned a bunch of properties right in the path of US 35 W that had to be bought and torn down for construction to begin.

If you wonder why demolition is the preferred method of “economic development in Dayton”- etcetera- it’s all because some political donor wrote a check. And as they say- payback is a real mo-fo.