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Seized by the State, Part One |
Bill Hudson | 8/6/09
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Eddie Villaneuva is sitting on the bench outside the entrance to his year-old restaurant, Eddie’s Uptown Grille, at the corner of Village Drive and North Pagosa Boulevard, two blocks north of Highway 160.
The locks have been changed, and Eddie is forbidden from going inside. In the window beside the front door, the state of Colorado has installed white sign with big, bold red letters: “SEIZED.” Continued...
“You get all these phone calls, like, ‘Hey, man, I support you, I want to give you my sympathy, I went through something like that once,’ and you can accept that, but unless you’ve actually been through this, you can’t really imagine what its like.
“The sleepless nights, the anxiety, the headaches, you know. All of that.”
“You keep having these images that replay in your head, over and over and over again. Images that you can’t shake.”
 Eddie’s dream — a centrally-located restaurant, serving a high-quality Mediterranean-style menu, and also serving as a prep location for his three-year-old catering business, Eddie B Cookin — dissolved into a nightmare in the middle of July, when the state of Colorado showed up at the restaurant, demanding that he immediately write a check for his delinquent sales taxes.
“$11,000 please. Right now, today. Or we seize your assets..
“Basically, I was treated as though I was an absolute criminal. I felt as if I was stripped of all my rights..
“I know I created this. I took a risk. I chose to set my priorities such that my employees came first. Keeping the doors open was absolute. With the hope that there would be some kind of turn-around when the tourist season kicked in, come summer.” Continued...
When the bottom fell out of the Pagosa Springs economy — an event that Eddie locates around November of last year — and the new restaurant was hit by a sudden drop in business, Eddie made a risky choice. He decided to delay paying his state employment taxes, and gradually fell further and further behind on his payments, as the local economy spiraled slowly downward.
“When January 20 came around, and I had to pay my fourth quarter taxes for 2008, there was no money there. I’d started tapping into my IRA, started tapping into whatever capital there was left, to make payroll. Once everything was paid, then I looked and there’s no money.”
Eddie was expecting to catch up during the first quarter of 2009, when he traditionally had a good number of catering jobs. But he found a number of new catering companies underbidding him on jobs he’d been expecting.
“We probably lost about $15,000 on catering that we normally do every year. That was a big factor.”
“But we still thought we could catch up over the summer.”
The summer never really happened for Eddie’s Uptown Grille, however.
“When we were shut down in July, we were on track to do about one-third of the business that we did last year during July. One third.”
Unfortunately, Eddie had underestimated the actions of the state of Colorado when they didn’t get their employee taxes for the second quarter in a row. The revenue department showed up on July 14 and Eddie and his employees were out on the street. The locks were changed, and a liquidation auction was scheduled for August 11. Continued...
“The action that the state is taking is really frustrating, because it has this compounding effect. Their mentality is, ‘Seize the assets, sell them off for what you can, and then we get our debt paid.’ But while that’s happening, we just sent out eight people to the unemployment line — by them taking their action and not working out some kind of terms with me.
“Number one, you’re closing down a business that’s now not generating any tax dollars — that’s not supporting the local economy by buying supplies at City Market and ALCO and from the food suppliers, you’re not generating any revenue for them — and you’re sending people out to the unemployment line, meaning that the state is paying out for their unemployment benefits.
“Is this counter-productive, what they’re really doing?”
To compound the humiliation, Eddie’s bank assets were frozen, and he was unable to pay his employees.
“I was just getting to the point of enjoying the restaurant, I felt I was finally figuring out how to make the whole thing work.”
The state also seized Eddie’s catering trailer — the trailer that had started Eddie off on his new — and mostly successful — food service career in Pagosa Springs, back in 2005.
“That’s when I reached the point of absolute critical despair. Where you start questioning whether you .. whether you even want to go on. I was really depressed for a couple of days. Then I came across a book that helped me come out of it a little bit.”
That book was Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ari & Rom Brafman, a timely collection of anecdotes and empirical research that looks at “sway”, the submerged mental drives that undermine rational action — from the desire to avoid loss, to a failure to consider evidence and the reluctance to alter a plan that isn't working.
To drive home their points, the authors use contemporary examples, such as the pivotal decisions of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush, coach Steve Spurrier and his Gators football team — and a sudden apparent epidemic of bipolar disorder in children, which may be due more to flawed thinking by doctors making the diagnoses.
“The book describes the irrational thinking behind the decisions of , very professional, intelligent people. When we see the ship is sinking, what causes us to believe that we can still go on?
“When I began to consider that people like Lyndon Johnson — people with much more intellect and ability than I have — also make irrational decisions like I did, I was inspired.
“I thought, you know, maybe life does go on.
“That’s when I thought — hey, Nate and Chris!”
Read Part Two... |
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