Hi everyone, I've been cruising the board, trying to get the complete picture of this mall debacle - I need the full story!

I occasionally share faith demoting stories with JackMo hubby and last night he said something about how Mormons do so much humanitarian aid.. I countered with, "Oh? I thought they just liked to build wildly expensive buildings (*cough temples! *cough cough*) and 5 billion dollar malls."

He who does not go to church or look into lds affairs had never heard of the mall. Of course he wanted sources so I promised I would get them.

So, I need to know, was it one of the profits who proposed the mall, as per the Lard's divine revelation? How much was it initially going to cost before God upgraded the budget specs?

I remember someone on here saying it was a church official who quoted the 5 bil number, is there a church source on that? I can never remember those church official guy's names, they all blur into "Old dude, old creepy looking dude, old necrotic looking dude..." in my thoughts.

It would be best if these were church sanctioned sources, he is very scornful of anything else (you know, h8ers will say anything to undermine the church. Boy does that tidbit of programming run deep...)

So what's the FULL story, with sources? Hell, if I get enough info I should probably just write a damned essay for him :P

I told him they have fountains that spit fire and he didn't believe me. Of course then I told him they were making the stores stay closed on Sundays and he believed me a little, lol.

Thank you all :D

I'm pretty sure Hinkley is the guy who first brought it up.

5 billion dollar mall, Its where Jesus is going to shop when he returns!

are sltrib, desnews, ksl

They did NOT spend 5 billion. The so-called "presiding bishop" of the mormon church, in an interview, said in passing that there was aprox a total of 5 billion worth of revitalization going on in downtown SLC, a large portion of which was City Creek.

City Creek appears (the morg doens't release financial info) to have cost between 1.5 billion (this was reported in desnews - a cult owned paper/website) and 2.5 billion (rumored).

so it wasnt on the mall, just around it :) ???????

has some good poop. Do a search on him.

but we've heard rumors up to $8B.

but understand, it's like the Boss Tweed Courthouse. (you can google it)

Since accounting is not reported, and the contracts are sealed, what you're paying and what you're spending are two entirely different things.

the difference ends up in some off shore account.

that's the purpose of a padded contract and an $8B building project development.

Here you go:

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,371984,371984#msg-371984

Quote:

First, start with LDS stats:

http://providentliving.org/welfare/pdf/WelfareFactSheet.pdf

This kind of document is the only official source on the value the church gives to helping the poor. They do not disclose their financial worth, expenses, income or any other indication of financial responsibility.

The LDS church since 1985 has given a combined $1.3 Billion in cash and service value to the poor as humanitarian assistance. (this breaks down to about $350M in cash and about $950 in non-cash service & in-kind donations. In any event, $1.3 over 26 years is about $50 million a year in value.) That comes out to be, on average, about $3.5 per year per current member (# listed above). That’s extremely low.

Ask the bishop, is this all the church gives?

Let him know that just Sunday, it was reported that Elder Holland had this to say:

(source http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/61847/BYU-Hawaii-Ground-broken-for-campus-expansion-project.html)


Holland: There is no money in our church except what the members offer.

That’s the source of the $3.5 per member per year donation? The rest goes to building campuses and other buildings. I found this one, that the church is building:

http://www.downtownrising.com/index.php/project-scope-a-timeline
and
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705366487/City-Creek-condos-go-on-sale-Monday.html
and
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705341784/Salt-Lake-City-high-rise-is-ready-for-occupancy-on-Main.html

The $3-4 Billion mall is owned by City Creek Reserve, Inc, a company of the Church, according to their own website (http://www.downtownrising.com/ ) Selling penthouse apartments for $1.5M and stores that will sell liquor.

So if Holland says all the money comes from the members, and the church spends about $50M a yr on Humanitarian aid, and it spends $3-4 billion on a mall in a few years (2008-2012), where are its priorities?

Certainly not with the poor. What kind of steward would I be to give money to building a mall instead of helping the poor?

More research shows the church owns:
 AgReserves Inc. - the largest producer of nuts in America (circa. 1997)[1]
 Hawaii Reserves, Inc. - Miscellaneous church holdings in Hawaii. Along with the Polynesian Cultural Center (the leading paid visitor attraction in Hawaii[25]) and Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Hawaii Reserves generated revenue of $260 million for the Hawaii economy in 2005.[26]
 Farmland Reserve Inc. - 228,000 acres (923 km²) in Nebraska,[27]; 51,600 acres in Osage County, Oklahoma[28]; and over 312,000 acres (1,260 km²) in Florida (dba Deseret Cattle and Citrus).[29]
 Bonneville International Corporation - the 14th largest radio chain in the U.S.[1]
 Deseret Morning News - a daily Utah newspaper, second-largest in the state of Utah.[30]
 Beneficial Financial Group - An insurance and financial services company with assets of $3.1 billion.[31]

And MANY more

The land alone is estimated worth $20Billion. The profit-companies are estimated worth another $15Billion. The Church owned land, campuses and temples are worth billions. When all is said and done, conservative estimates put the combined wealth of the church and its affiliated corporations at around $60Billion

This is not hard to believe. Tithing collected from $14,000,000 members, where say $2million are temple going, full tithed, active US workers, puts the estimate at ($50,000/yr avg US salary X 10% X 2M members = ) $10 Billion per year in tithing collection.

Over 25 years, that would easily make up $60 Billion, if not considerably more. Out of that, in 25 years, they gave $1.2 billion to the poor. That’s barely 2% .

How do normal, non-religious consumer-oriented corporations do in their giving?



Source: http://philanthropy.com/article/Interactive-Tracking-Big/128359/

Source: http://philanthropy.com/article/Chart-Companies-That-in-2010/128358/


If you look at the net profit before taxes, the companies that earn 1/20th what the LDS church gets in tithing each year, they pay MORE in donations that does the LDS church, which is supposed to be a charity in the first place.

I would do better to buy groceries at Target, Safeway or Smiths, donate the groceries to poor families in Provo and feel safe that more than 2% of the profits they earn from me are also going to the poor.

Until the LDS church provides me with more transparency on their financial operations, donations and expenditures, I don’t feel comfortable giving to them.

Why would I ever trust the owner of the City Creek Mall to wisely use my tithing donations?

wow, amazing post, thank you for those details! What an abysmally low percentage for humanitarian efforts. He ribs me for protestant preachers getting paid to preach, living in nice houses, but in our church you can opt for your entire tithe to go straight to humanitarian aid. And it actually does, the church records are wide open for anyone to see. It is so hard to find numbers on lds affairs... You all are very helpful :D

The next time he gets onto me with the lds superiority complex, I may just read him your posting, thank you

oops



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2012 10:13AM by southern.

IIRC, Hinckley estimated the cost to be around $700 mil when it was first announced and "no tithing dollars" would be used. Of course, that number kept getting raised and I think the $2Bil figure is closer to the final figure.

People are already complaining about the lack of eating establishments that serve alcohol, the Sunday closing and the fact that nearly all the stores are high end ones that price the locals out. I know someone who works at one of these little clothing shops and during the week, she said it is absolutely dead.

So, after all the hype and the lookie-loos who have come to have a peek at the grand place, most go back to their shopping habits and free parking. I believe the cost of parking is having a large impact on City Creek, too.

Go to the SLTRIB and you will find all kinds of articles about this project dating back years.

The mall (and it is just a mall) was projected to cost $750 million, but overruns took it to double that and perhaps as high as $2.5 or 3 billion. The problems with this are many, in that the church was able to easily reach into its pocket and keep plocking more and more money on the table with hardly a care.

At the same time, other grander things have built with less money, such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. This indicates a lot of poor judgment and mismanagement by LDS, Inc. Some have even suggested money laundering. But it's also easy to point out that the church has given only something like $1.5 billion to charity over the last 10 years, whereas the Salvation Army spent $3.24 billion serving people just in 2010. There continues to be no comparison between any so-called humanitarian efforts of the LDS church and the other various Christian charities and NGOs. To further complicate the problem, a lot of the charitable contributions for which the LDS church takes credit are actually goods-in-kind provided by members and not the church. The Mormon church's "humanitarian efforts" seem mostly geared toward providing good Mormons with a sense that the church does grand things for poor people, when really the rest of the world knows better. But good Mormons remain insular and cannot process this in their brains without outside facts.

You can go to the Salvation Army's site or that of other charities like Catholic Relief and get a run-down of all their expenses in any given year. The LDS church provides no such detail, even for their best and most worthy members. If their dealings require such secrecy, then there is something fundamentally wrong with what they are doing. In short, there is funny business afoot. The more they don't tell you, the more funny business there is afoot. Around the same time as the CCC construction, the LDS church became downright penurious and began withholding funds from wards and stakes, firing janitors and demanding the members clean their own damn buildings, and getting rid of certain paid positions and making unpaid senior missionaries step into those positions. This might signal some wobbly financial things in the Mormon church, like maybe having extended themselves a bit too much and having to tighten their collective belt. But you'll never know because the Mormon church does not operate above-board and their finances are, as usual, shrouded in secrecy.

There is a fundamental belief among Mormons, particularly in leadership, that things like the glowing City Creek Mall, Gladys Knight, and BYU football prove to the public that the church is true. People will wander into the Nordstrom's at CCC and somehow the next thing you know they will want to join the church. This is a sure sign of a prosperity cult's magical thinking. But it's one thing for Mormons to think in these terms, and quite another for people off the street to reason in the same manner. Since there is a tremendous failure rate among malls, it is odd that the church has thrown so many resources behind this one. CCC already sits partially on the site of a failed mall, and is only a couple of miles away from what has been a fairly successful one. Some people be really scratching their heads.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2012 10:01AM by cludgie.

Why are they able to be so secretive about their finances? Do they report them to the government? I wonder if someday there is going to be a huge whistle blowing scandal about their finances (money laundering would NOT surprise me in the least) followed by a mass exodus.. One can only dream, eh?

Religions & church "charities" and their auxiliaries (e.g., malls) are not required by law to report financial info, once they qualify and are designated as a charity under US/IRS law.

http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=152729,00.html

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch is (or was) the senate head of the finances sub-committee on charities and policy regarding them. You can bet he's greased a few iron-rods to help his SLC cronies.

He is about to be in charge of the entire finance committee

http://www.orrinhatch.com/issues/finance-committee

"When I'm President, I'll need Orrin Hatch as Senate Finance Chair to help me restore America as a land of opportunity and prosperity." -Mitt Romney



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2012 10:24AM by Jesus Smith.