Well, Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert certainly has a sense of humor. This was evident with the ridiculous excuse she gave for increasing the tax rate 6.5% recently.
According to the Lampasas Dispatch, Talbert said “residents now receive a greater level of services than they did years ago, the last time the tax rate increased.”
I’ve been around here since 2011 – the last time the RATES were supposedly increased – and if there is a greater level of service since then, you sure sneaked it past me.
Unless by “services” you mean the service of taking huge piles of $100 bills from taxpayers/citizens and setting them on fire in a spectacular orgy of waste and incompetence.
You know – like the $1.5 million you blew remodeling Old City Hall, which was your signature vanity project. The waste included canceling a $34,000 A/V system that was properly bid on by Broadcast Works and instead blowing nearly $100,000 on a NO-BID A/V contract with Azbell Electronics.
That kind of service?
Or maybe the service she is referring to is taking the lowest bid of $96,000 for the Old City Hall elevator and throwing it in the trash bin and instead paying $126,000 for said elevator (which is currently 6 months past its installation date).
Maybe the “service” is blowing over $1,000,000.00 on a “Business Park” which remains an empty 165-acre weed patch used for nothing but dumping bodies?
A mayor who wastes six-figure and seven-figure sums over and over is not a mayor who is worried about money, obviously. Yet here we are a year later, and she is fine with jacking up property taxes over TWELVE PERCENT**….ready to blame the huge increase on “increased city services” instead of the piles of money wasted over the last few years on her pet projects.
** How do I get a 12% increase? Well, the average taxable value of a Lampasas residence increased over 6% last year – from $92,110 to $97,904…(must be all those newly-minted Corvive pyramid scheme millionaires in town bidding up mansions!!)
In fact, property VALUATIONS have been climbing ever since that same year of 2011 – a fact Talbert ignores when she tries to put lipstick on this pig by claiming RATES haven’t been raised since 2011. Tack on another 6.3% RATE increase on that increase valuation, and voila: over 12%.
While Talbert may be hilarious with her ridiculous explanations, in the end the joke is on the taxpayer who pays for her mistakes. As usual.