Yes, bankruptcy is no fun. When my business, like so many other printing and direct mail firms at the time, encountered very difficult shrinking markets and hyper-competitive pricing battles, my firm suffered. The banks that financed the expensive equipment my company needed opted not to negotiate. Why bother? I had used my own assets as collateral, and the bank knew that whatever debt remained after it took what I owned was insured by the SBA. I lost everything. That story was repeated dozens of times during those days, shattering the lives of many people in the same industry.
Lesson learned. But how fortunate in our wonderful nation that people like Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, Milton Hershey, Gov. John Connally of Texas and countless thousands of little guys like me were and are able get a second chance after experiencing the disappointment of a bankruptcy. I am not the first to have succumbed to bad economic times and will not be the last. The honor is in the effort to achieve, and it has made me a wiser man.
I’m still an entrepreneur, but on a much smaller scale and at a much lower risk.
All that unfortunate history aside, I am greatly saddened by the cowardly anonymity of some of my opponent’s supporters. Attacking me by using a straw-dog in the form of a mud-slinger from across township lines is pretty despicable. I’ll give my opponent the benefit of the doubt and assume she had nothing to do with rummaging through my personal history to find events that occurred over a decade ago. As I have mentioned publicly, I have not the slightest interest in hunting for any skeletons in my opponent’s closets. We should all be better than that. But, I do wonder who paid for the background check. Public record yes, but you don’t get that level of detail without buying it.
This election is not about the past, it is about the future, and as a supervisor of Kennett Township, I will be a stalwart guardian of the public’s trust. That really is what my whole campaign is about.
Ted Moxon
Candidate for Kennett Township Supervisor
(4 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)
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Ted Moxon, candidate for Kennett Township supervisor has stated in all of his candidate literature that he is a business owner with 25 years experience, numerous employees, and millions of dollars in revenue. He has said again, on his mail piece that he will be an effective and thrifty steward of township finances.”
I believe his personal bankruptcy filings from 2004-2005 show a different history. Ted ran up more than $2.5 mILLION dollars worth of debt ($2,547,009) before declaring bankruptcy, commingled his personal funds and business funds, and even took out a loan from the business to himself of $289,715 dollars while defaulting on debt to many small businesses in the area. Unlike most bankruptcy petitions one reads about where the assets and liabilities are roughly proportional, Ted had only $141,000 while running up this shocking level of debt — including a $652,357 Small Business Administration loan, guaranteed by the federal government.
His failure to manage his personal and business finances doesn’t bode well for someone wanting to take control of our community’s finances. We are already paying for his past bad decisions, as taxpayers, by having to make good on that SBA loan through our tax dollars.
In addition, by not disclosing this to voters or being up front about it, he is failing at being adequately transparent, a charge he regularly levels at the current supervisors, without mentioning at all what those failures might be, or how he would enhance transparency. As a result, I find the basis for his claims to be a credible and qualified candidate for the position suspect to say the least.
In addition, in a candidate’s forum last night at Kendal, Ted went on about his passion for open space, but suggested we might need to repeal the voter-approved open space fund, which would remove the dedicated funds voters overwhelmingly want, and would grind preservation projects to a halt.
I believe Ted’s claims and his actions are contradictory at best, and hypocritical at worst, and that the voters of the Township need to know all the facts prior to election day.
For the record, his filings are available through PACER, The Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, https://www.pacer.gov/ and require no special skills or funds to access.
(Editor’s note: Whitney Hoffman is a candidate for Kennett Township supervisor.)