Kim Blickenstaff's company is Tandem Diabetes Care (TNDM). It's stock price has cratered over the last year from a high of $150.52 to $46.10/share. His net worth has cratered with it. He owns some 215,000 shares of TNDM. He is 70 years old... and may be re-evaluating his retirement goals. The board of TNDM may be re-evaluating whether Blickenstaff should remain Chairman. I could be wrong here but I don't think any of his local investments have the sort of return potential to make up for that. Sankoty is probably the only property with solid return potential but even that is probably thin, as most hotel/resorts are.That said.... TNDM is rated highly undervalued and good chance of a solid return... eg a Strong Buy. The need for diabetes care is not going away.

Don't know how solid this case is but if the plaintiffs have solid evidence, Blickenstaff could be in a bad place over Sankoty. Might lose it.

So... something interesting... Blickenstaff's tenure as Chairman of the board, expires in May of 2023. No word on whether he intends to run again. The notice to shareholders doesn't come out until Mid March. The sagging stock performance, his age... he might just bow out or be forced to bow out.He retired as CEO in 2019. He has been Chairman of the Board since.

Does any of this make you wonder why he, pretty much out of nowhere, blew into town, started buying up multiple properties, throwing money around, announcing all the projects, and starting many, all within a few months? I guess if you have the $$ to do that, but he isn't THAT wealthy.
I just hope the Armory and Spruck Mansion don't meet the same demise as Hale church, but not holding my breath.

When interest rates were near zero not so long ago, the ability to leverage your business rapidly was easy. It can make a modest multi-millionaire look a lot larger. The interest rates now are almost certainly putting on some hard breaks. Maybe he isn't as financial savvy as his large bank account appears.

He might have also been lured in on the hype train of real estate investing. Took a look at Peoria and thought there was some big opportunity for growth. Kind of like all these investor landlords pouring in... except... Peoria isn't California. KDB was a driver for price growth and it has killed off investments in the Heights by others. Like that single room condo I mentioned... no one else is buying at those crazy prices. KDB may have found it was the bag holder all along.

Didn't he return to Peoria, after many years away, because of a family members health? It memory serves correctly, he announced some projects fairly quickly followed by more announcements. It all just seemed so unfocused and impulsive to the point almost seemed extremely chaotic.
So that things have come unraveled is really not a major surprise.

All these projects... are vanity projects. They are 'nice to haves'. But... we don't have the economic base to support all these projects. We need more low skilled jobs and new industries that drive income growth and broader wealth generation. We need something to replace the departing/ed Caterpillar jobs.

@Mahkno : Yikes.Sources: Sankoty Lakes ceases operations, no reopening date set
www.25newsnow.com/20 23/01/06/sankoty-lak es-ceases-operations -no-reopening-d
Sankoty Lakes Resort, a KDB Group Property has ceased operations Friday, effective immediately, according to company emails sent to 25 News.

 

A would-be customer sent us a cancellation email from the resort. They had reservations for Memorial Day weekend. The message says the resort made the decision, "to cease operations within the property, effective immediately, with no reopening date set."

 

That cancellation email also says if a "deposit was collected upon reservation, it will be refunded according to the method of payment used at the time of booking."

 

The resort is on seasonal shutdown and we have not been able to confirm the fate of any of the employees.

 

This comes after a vague announcement Wednesday from KDB Group that said they were "reevaluating the scope of existing and future operations of all projects and properties in the Peoria area."

 

Sources also confirmed to 25 News Wednesday the last day of operations is January 15 for two of the historic properties that were refurbished by KDB Group since 2019. In fact, January 14 is the last dates of performances listed on the website calendars of the Scottish Rite Theatre and the Betty Jayne Brimmer Center for the Performing Arts.

 

A Washington native also told 25 News Thursday she is now looking for a new place for her wedding reception that's five months out. She too received a similar cancellation email from the Brimmer Center.

 

Still, other sources tell 25 News more than 50 employees of various KDB Group properties were given notice earlier this week that their jobs were going away.

@billybob : Exactly what I was trying to say.

@AntiRanchDrssng : Thank God for that! It may take forever and a day to raise the money they need to fully restore it but at least they put that money to good use and took care of some structural issues.

Wow, Sankoty Lakes had 66 employees?www.centralillinoisp roud.com/news/local- news/66-sankoty-lake s-employees-los(Disclosure: I was not involved in this story)

A source told me the entire KDB business is being shuttered.

@billybob : I can't find the full Frontline episode on it, but here is the written narrative on the "biggest" currency collapse we never heard of.The Forewarning in 1998: Long-Term Capital Management
www.shoppbs.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline /warning/themes/ltcm .html
People had always wondered, sort of academically, would it be possible to have a derivative chain reaction, some collapse that would lead to a so-called systemic crisis, meaning obviously that the system was threatened, not just one firm or two firms?

 

And that summer [of 1998], out of nowhere, Russia, which had been the darling of Wall Street -- everybody wanted to float bonds for Russia -- Russia defaults on their ruble-denominated debt.

 

And ... basically markets say: "OK, it was a bad move to take risks on Russia. We don't know what other risks are good. Therefore, we don't want any risks."

 

Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) is a hedge fund in Greenwich, [Conn.], which really no one had heard of except for the Wall Street cognoscenti. It had fewer than 200 employees, had 16 partners, but was leveraged something like 30 or 40:1. Had all kinds of derivative bets, but all their bets were pointed one way, which was it was betting people would become less worried about risk.

 

And when they became more worried about risk -- and the firm had all sorts of models that said, no matter what happened, based on history, they couldn't lose more than $35 million a day -- they started dropping $300, 400, 500 million every day.

 

They had had $7 billion of capital. They thought they had so much capital, they gave back $3 billion to their investors right before this. Then they start losing these chunks.

 

Everyone else on Wall Street had similar bets to them. They're sort of sucked down into this vortex, and the more they try to sell out of these things, the more the steamroller goes.

 

And Wall Street freaks is what happens.

 

The New York Federal Reserve calls in the top 14, 15 banks to say: "LTCM's going to go down. Who knows who it'll take down with them? You guys ought to do something with them." And 14 banks agree to put up a few hundred million each, about $3.5 billion total. One bank refuses. That was Bear Stearns, incidentally. …

 

One of the things with LTCM is that no one had any idea. … No one knew how many other people had the same position and how much the market was on one side of it, how big that side was. And this was one of the things that making derivatives exchange-traded might go to.

 

So there was this momentary period when people said, "You know, we got pretty close to the edge." LTCM was a very scary moment.

 

It really was?

 

Yeah, it was very scary. Credit markets around the world just shut down. There was a two-, three-, four-week period of real panic. People were very, very frightened. Even Goldman Sachs lost a billion dollars. They had to cancel their public offering. Merrill Lynch lost a tremendous -- and these firms were worried about, in some cases, their future; in some cases, their survival.

 

It was a real bloodletting. So there was this shrinking back then. And people said a lot of things which they ended up not meaning, like, "We're never going to get leveraged again like this." Of course, they did. And, "We're going to look harder at derivatives." That was another one of the things they said that didn't last long.
...

It almost seemed like 'charity' to me the way he apparently was throwing $$ around on what appeared to be very risky projects. Someone smarter than me once told me, one project at a time, finish it, and move on to next.
The lawsuit over Sankoty appears to be a major issue