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Health & Fitness

You May Be A Lottery Winner!

Pull out your lottery ticket (property tax bill)  and look to see if you live in area 17a of the community facilities district 93-1. If you find "CFD (93-1) 17a" on your tax bill, you are a winner in Beaumont's City Council's latest round of the CFD lottery!

What do you win? 11 more years of CFD payments! This may be an additional $25,000 in taxes for some of you lucky homeowners!

On April 2, 2013, the city reissued the CFD bonds for area 17a in order to drop the interest rate paid by our middleman, the City, by less than 1%. This won't lower tax payers' rate but it does extend your term an additional 11 years. The new term ends in 2034.

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Those of you in area 19c were already winners in January 2013 and you probably didn't even know it. This was when the council extended the maturity date on your CFDs to 2036 to lower the city, not your, interest rate less than 1%. If you're not a winner this time around, don't worry; at the rate the council is refinancing the CFDs, we will all soon be able to celebrate our winnings.

All of these bonds are being refinanced just when more of your payments are going to reduce the principal. It's no wonder there has been so little reduction in principal on all of our debt. I worte about the lack of significant principal reduction in April. Here's a link to a spreadsheet I put together: Beaumont CFD No. 93-1 Spreadsheet. You can see on the spreadsheet that ten years of payments has only reduced the principal on the area 17a bond by less than 3%. The next ten years should have completely reduced the principal. Now the next ten years will have very little effect on the principal.

Find out what's happening in Banning-Beaumontwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

You can thank Mr. Kapanicas and his firm, General Government Management Services; Rod Gunn Associates Inc (Financial Advisor); Oconnor & Company Securities Inc (Underwriter); McFarlin & Anderson (Bond Counsel); and Union Back (Trustee) for structuring this deal for a "modest fee". And, don't forget to thank Mr. Berg, Mr. De Forge, Mr. Fox, Mr. Castaldo and Mrs. Knight for approving the deal.

Mr. Kapanicas and the council recently told us our payments wouldn't go up. They conveniently forgot to tell us there would be ten years more of them.

Congratulations to the winners! Stay tuned to find out about the next round of winners.

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