Month: May 2020

LEDC Grant Program Recipients And Amounts

Do I blame businesses for applying for grants (free money) when it is offered? Of course not. After all, the LEDC skims over $300,000 in sales tax revenue every year and wastes almost all of it on idiotic projects like the ‘business park’….and they PAY Mandy Walsh $101,000 in salary and benefits to do it! So, seeing taxpayers get a sliver of their money back that was stolen by government morons in the first place is a good thing.

Of course, I would prefer that that $400,000 is never skimmed in the first place and is LEFT in the hands of those who actually earned it….rather than people having to go to a group of overlords (Walsh, deGraffenreid, Monroe, Talbert) and beg for their own money back.

Furthermore, I don’t trust that group of overlords to know what the hell they are doing, since NONE of them has ever owned a business and probably don’t even know the difference between ‘revenue’ and ‘profit’. So you’ll pardon me if I wanted to see how much they gave to whom and if any of it makes any sense at all.

I’d argue that some places on this list deserve more and some deserve zero. But that’s the nature of an arbitrary cash grab run by dunces: somebody (and probably several somebodies) is going to get hosed hard while others get a windfall they don’t deserve. I leave distinction to you, dear reader.

Some businesses will probably be miffed that I’m making this public. I don’t really care. The grant applications made it very clear these are tax dollars and subject to public disclosure. As the old saying goes: with government shekels comes government shackles.

So, without further ado:

One thing is sure: barbers, hairdressers, bartenders and servers got screwed the hardest during this whole forced shutdown. Must have driven them crazy to see people cramming into Wal-Mart legally while THEY weren’t allowed to even cut ONE person’s hair. Talk about a screw job.

Thank Goodness City Council Handed The Developer of Stone Valley $72,000

I did some ranting last year about City council waiving electrical hookup fees for rich developer Deorald Finney – which cost the City approximately $72,000 in lost fees [5/21/19 page 10]. City council (most of whom are reliant on the taxpayer for their OWN salaries and only one of whom has an inkling of the real business world) was in such a huge rush to “promote development” that they just gave away the farm for no reason at all.

“GIMME $72,000!!!!!” <—————————-> “Derrrr ummm….OK”

Proof they did the wrong thing comes today in the latest Dispatch (5/28/20 page 7) – where we learn that while everyone else was forced to stay in their homes like scared rabbits this spring – and many business were wrecked and jobs lost – Stone Valley was just chugging right along on their construction.

In fact, according to the article: “Danielle Sheppard, a Lampasas resident who works for Coldwell Banker: ‘We are definitely in a seller’s market.‘ The supply of available homes has had a hard time keeping up with the demand for housing as more people flock to Central Texas.”

How nice! Deorald will have no problem selling his houses for TOP DOLLAR…and he gets an extra $72k to boot, thanks to the dummies on City council!

Of course, Deorald is not only helped by City council handing him free shit, he’s also helped by the morons at the Federal Reserve who have pegged rates at zero (yet again) in order to screw savers and encourage reckless borrowing. I guess it pays to have the largest lobbying group in Washington DC.

Economic lesson for City council dummies: when people are fleeing liberal dumps like San Francisco, New York City and Chicago and choosing Texas in droves anyways, YOU DON’T NEED TO HAND OUT SUBSIDIES. They are coming here no matter what. If anything, you should be extracting an extra pound of flesh from these guys…after all: IT’S A SELLER’S MARKET!!!

The Goldfish Swim Tonight – Live Commentary – 5:30pm

“A weem a way a weem a way, a weem away a weem a way

In the Fishbowl, the pricey Fishbowl, the Goldfish swim tonight”

Topics of discussion (my predictions):

  1. We’re spending another $2 million on the idiotic corpse-repository ‘business park’. Screw you.
  2. We’re closing the pools this summer. Screw you.
  3. We’re giving Finley $140,000 a year. Screw you.

Also guys, I’m still waiting on that list of businesses you handed out $100,000 in tax dollars to! Tell JC Brown to stop racking up the billable hours and cough it up already. There’s no way around it.

MEETING NOTES

5:30pm: Six of us masochists waiting on the Internet to watch…..

Finley now talking about the corpse repository ‘business park”. He is informing council that the BP is not as shovel-ready as we were led to believe. Mandy now about to run through the nearly TWO MILLION MORE DOLLARS they want to piss down this rat hole. The bank will likely only lend around $900k. Leaving approximately one million short.

According to Mandy, there is plenty of demand for the business park [LOL!!], but it’s not ready for them to move in…even though they said it was “shovel ready” almost FIVE YEARS AGO. Three years ago, then-candidate Delana Toups said “businesses were on the verge of moving into the corpse repository business park“….which was clearly a complete lie.

5:40pm: Now the LEDC is begging council for $500,000 to “develop” the property further. You know – the shovel-ready property. Who are these prospects???? They have NEVER named a single prospect by name.

Mike White admitting the thing is a “goat patch” and his preference is to sell the entire thing. I love it. EXACTLY RIGHT.

Somebody else now claiming there is a “prospect” willing to pull the trigger on moving in….a supposed “proven business”. OK – WHO IS IT???? Morons! Really guys – if you expect to be taken seriously, then name the damn prospect already.

Randy “Speed Bump” Clark now jumping in….I have no idea what his point was.

I almost feel sorry for these saps. They have painted themselves into a corner with this silly-assed ‘business park’ and there is really no way out without spending FURTHER millions on a shaky idea or dumping it and looking stupid.

Finley now using $140,000 terms like “development matrix”.

Now they are discussing mooching off taxpayers by applying for grants (‘free money from other people’) at the state or federal level…or maybe USDA. City saying their best guess is 8 to 10 months to get the shovel-ready park actually ready. Which likely means 18 months, if you convert to Finley time.

Mike White falling victim to the “sunk cost fallacy” – saying they have too much invested to walk away. Admits it is a shitty project on ROI terms.

TJ Monroe totally and enthusiastically in favor of flushing more money down the toilet – huge shocker. This pea-brain sits on City council AND the LEDC. A double whammy of stupidity.

Speed Bump back in there talking about chasing a chicken. Gotta love the old guy!

These bozos are all talking themselves into flushing more money down the toilet. Of course, there is then the question of where all those millions come from. Council is now on record as “we need to shoe this horse or sell it…let’s shoe it and move on”. Wrong call. The next TWO MILLION DOLLARS will not put any lipstick on this pig.

Taking a break now before workshop session. Sixteen people in the Internet peanut gallery now.

Back in session…..Chamber of Commerce representative speaking. Quite frankly, I have no idea why the City pays money to the Chamber of Commerce. Makes zero sense to me. I’ll just let this chick prattle on for a bit.

Police chief now talking about the commercial vehicles being parked on residential streets. This issue bores me a bit – all about permitting. Still waiting for pool discussion.

This is brutal. Parking permitting STILL being discussed 20 minutes later. Crazy how council makes us listen to hours of boring minutiae but when it comes to a three minute discussion of Finley getting a $10,000 raise, they can’t bother us with that and it gets hidden away.

Mike White for banning huge trucks altogether. HERE HERE! Agreed. Let’s get on with it!

6:36pm: FINALLY….moving on to a stop sign Delana Toups wants put somewhere or something. At least she hasn’t brought up the Tree Police idea lately.

6:40pm: Pools about to be discussed. Some chick (Kim?) is at the mic who apparently runs the pools. Didn’t catch her name. They need 32 employees to run the pools and 23 are lifeguards. She only has EIGHT trained guards. She needs to train 12 new lifeguards….now she’s explaining that nobody applied. [see my discussion about WAGES TOO LOW!!!]

[No mention, of course, that if City council hadn’t dicked around two weeks ago and tabled this discussion until today, that she could have been halfway there already. So, there’s that. Good job, Goldfish!]

She is telling us it takes a month to train everyone….school starts August 10th…we’d only have a 5-week pool season…uuuhhh oooh…here comes the bad news….BAM – proposes to close Hanna for the season.

Now she’s claiming closing Hanna is good so they can “do repairs”. Christ lady – what have you been doing the last SIX MONTHS?!?!? Total nonsense.

She proposes Hancock pool open with a ton of ridiculous Covid bullshit attached: Capacity greatly reduced…something about cleaning the bathrooms constantly (we all piss in the pool…forget that one)…nobody without a parent…more blah blah blah about social distancing.

One Goldfish (Toups?) is upset that the pool is only for local residents. What if cousins come in from out of town? [Lol. Too bad!]. Kim shoots that shit down: “this isn’t a normal summer”. HA! Starting to like this Kim chick a bit. Amen – you’re already reducing total City pool capacity by like 75% – outsiders can pound sand, ding dong.

This whole “capacity reduction” is retarded in the extreme. If you’re gonna open, then OPEN. Such nonsense. If Ricky Roy was the mayor, he’d tell the Gov to suck an egg.

Finley “$140,000 salary” deGraffenreid is now discussing the 2020/2021 budget. He’s concerned about sales tax receipts going down into the new year (obviously). He’s sounding like every politician ever: we’ll keep taxes low and give you all you want! I don’t see a point in detailing all this as it’s likely smoke, mirrors and crazy assumptions. I’ll start believing the numbers they come up with in late July. That’s when the REAL numbers come out and we find the IT Department gets a 15% increase or something.

Very last thing he throws out: employee compensation. LOL. Can’t forget that one. Lemme guess: raises for everyone!

Ricky Roy on deck! All City buildings open to the public June 1st. They will practice social distancing and sneeze guards are being installed all over the damn place. RICKY, NOOOOO!!!! This isn’t you, Ricky. YOU KNOW this social distancing is all horseshit.

City Manager Now Makes $140,000 Per Year – Then Versus Now

Finley started as City Manager around 2011, if memory serves me right. So I went and looked at the budget numbers for the 2011/2012 year. Here are some comparisons. (Remember, the make-work position of “Assistant City Manager” was added in there around 2018 or 2019). But the point remains: these are the costs to “manage the city” and they have grown FAR faster than population and inflation have.

TOTAL City manager expense line:

THEN: $133,000 NOW: $331,480 (150% increase in 8 years or 18.75% per year)

CITY MANAGER SALARY (This is JUST Finley):

THEN: $91,798 NOW: $140,000 (52% increase in 8 years or 6.5% per year)

CITY MANAGER RETIREMENT BENEFITS:

THEN: $14,903 NOW: $38,000 (155% increase in 8 years or 19.4% per year)

CITY MANAGER INSURANCE BENEFITS:

THEN: $6,126 NOW: $23,473 (283% increase in 8 years or 35% PER YER!!)

CITY MANAGER CAR ALLOWANCE:

THEN: $6,000 NOW: $12,000 (100% increase in 8 years or 12.5% per year)

No matter how you slice it, the increase in costs to “manage” the City has been tremendous. I doubt there are many taxpaying saps in the private sector here in Lampasas who saw their salaries go up almost 7% per year. Nor did their retirement benefits skyrocket like that either. Yet THEY are the ones paying this burden to the already-overpaid bureaucrats at the top. And CITY COUNCIL are the ones allowing it!!

Speaking of City council, TJ Monroe’s name is on that 2011/2012 budget as well! Christ, lady – how long have you been sitting in that council seat? Maybe it’s time to hang up the cleats and go play bingo on Monday nights instead. NOBODY needs to sit on City council for that long, I don’t care if you’re the smartest person in the world – which she most definitely is not.

Time for some new blood, clearly. Perhaps some actual local business owners could run for a council seat. As it is now, Mike White is the only ONE of SEVEN on there who can say that…and he’s leaving this fall. God help us.

City Manager Gets A Secret $10,000 Raise. Seriously.

Last week, the local radio station asked [City manager] Finley deGraffenreid if he had gotten a $10,000 raise from City council recently and he had no comment. I don’t know how in the hell the radio guy found out about it, but Finley did not deny it.

Wha-what?? Finley got a $10,000 raise? First I’ve heard of this. I saw nothing about it in the minutes nor have I heard it discussed in any City council meeting. Which means it was done in “executive session” – which is Latin for “in secret”. Not wanting to post a falsehood, I did the simplest thing I could think of to answer the question: I asked Finley point blank if he was recently given a $10,000 raise. His answer? Yes, it is true.

Like cats burying their stinky turds in shame, so do The Seven Goldfish hand out 7.7% raises to a guy ALREADY making $130,000 per year in secret executive session.

Mind you, that $140,000 is just the SALARY part. According to Finley himself in past comments, you need to add 40% to that to get the TRUE cost to the taxpayer – to account for the cushy benefits and retirement packages. That would put him at roughly $182,000 annual cost to the taxpayer. OUCH!!

I find it sickening that at a time when many of us taxpaying saps are being laid off and/or taking pay cuts due to FORCED government closings/overreactions from the Wuhan virus, the very people who forced businesses shut are getting large raises.

[Oh – and they STILL are crying poor about paying lifeguards a decent wage. Guess we won’t have any pools open this year]

Just to recap for those on the short bus (and the IT Department):

  1. City forces businesses closed in a massive overreaction to Wuhan Flu
  2. City cries poor – can’t pay more than minimum wage to pool workers and thus complains they have nobody applying for pool jobs.
  3. City goes behind closed doors and hands Finley a $10,000 raise ON TOP of his current $130,000 salary.

This is what happens when FOUR of the current seven members of City council (Toups, Kuehne, Clark, Williamson) owe their current or past paychecks to forced extractions from the taxpayers. It means they don’t understand the value of a dollar and will always side with the OTHER tax TAKERS instead of the tax PAYERS they supposedly represent. Over HALF of City council was or is, technically, employed by the government and reliant on taxpayer largess.

Of course, we have no idea how this all went down or who voted for or against – since it was all done in secret. As usual. MY guess is it was unanimous – that way they can present a unified front and deflect any second-guessing by us fools in the private sector. Call it honor among the council thieves.

To say the optics of this are really bad would be an understatement -which is why they kept it hush-hush. What the HELL would possess City council to SECRETLY hand Finley a $10,000 raise NOW when he ALREADY costs the taxpayers roughly $15,000 PER MONTH??? The timing is extremely bizarre.

I can think of only a few scenarios:

  1. Finley marched in and demanded it or he would quit on the spot.
  2. Finley is considering retiring in the next year or two and wants to jack up his “average salary” so his pension is higher for the rest of his life (this is common among government parasites).
  3. The Seven Goldfish are about 50% dumber than I previously estimated.

So – which is it, guys?? Care to comment in the public record at tonight’s meeting? Maybe call up The Dispatch and explain yourselves? Or are you just going to assume the taxpayer will bend over and take it like they always do?

FUN FACTS from the CURRENT BUDGET [pages 2 and 16]

ANNUAL City manager line item expenses: $331,480 **

INCLUDES:

FULL TIME SALARY: $225,000

EXTRA PAY: $4,332

CAR ALLOWANCE: $12,000

RETIREMENT BENEFIT: $37,929

HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFIT: $23,473

TELEPHONE: $2,500

** Now remember, these budget numbers included the position of Assistant City Manager (RIP Gary Cox) who was fired ‘resigned’ in October. The ACM position was a make-work job that Misti Talbert was all for creating a couple years ago. Why did they need to create an ACM position? Because Finley was apparently super busy with expensive and useless side projects like the $1.5 million dollar City Hall remodel and the $2 million weed patch ‘business park’ project.

[So, they created an entirely new Asst. City Manager $90,000 salary position (plus tens of thousands in benefits) for an “assistant”. He is now gone.]

However, as I recall, Ricky Roy has been moved up to ACM recently and I’m assuming that “City Manager” line item will continue to grow, since the position wasn’t eliminated.

Perhaps The Seven Goldfish are handing Finley $10,000 because they haven’t had to pay Gary Cox for the last 6 months? OK – but then why do it in secret? Why not make it a one-time bonus instead of a permanent raise?? IF they survived the last 6 months without an ACM, then why not continue to do so??

All good questions I doubt we’ll ever get an answer to.

Stephanie Fitzharris Is The Type of Marxist Moron We Need Far Less Of

In honor of Memorial Day. Many men have fought and died battling socialist/communist scum of the earth over the last century. Unfortunately, our own country (nay, our own STATE) is now seeing increasing numbers of socialist/commie scum trying to overturn all that has been fought for. Today, we profile one right here in Texas.

Stephanie Fitzharris is an imbecile who frequently shows up on LCBN Facebook discussions. She is somehow related to a local Lampasas locust (Janet Yoder Kraeff-Crozier-Thunberg), which makes complete sense considering how much they both annoy me and how utterly wrong they both are when it comes to economics, liberty, politics, and common sense.

Fitzharris lists herself as “artist mom”, “baseball mom” and “Austinite since 1979”. You can learn a lot from these self labels:

Artist mom: this means she doesn’t work any real job. Relies on husband while she sits at home all day posting on Facebook about how much she loves Bernie Sanders. She stupidly wonders what the big deal is about staying home like a scared rabbit and missing work because of a virus…because she didn’t work BEFORE all of this. Her life has not changed. But she LOVES telling other people to wear masks and listen to her demands. Because she is a useful idiot to the Marxist scum trying to ruin this once-great country.

Baseball mom: annoys every single acquaintance with endless photos of her kid’s baseball games. Better hope the ump doesn’t make the wrong call, or she will sue!! #Karen

Community Activist: Always screaming for Bigger Government and More Free Stuff.

She probably gives out raisins on Halloween, wears a mask in a car by herself, and asks to see the Burger King manager because she didn’t get enough ketchup packets at the drive-thru.

She is ALSO a hypocrite of massive proportions. She is the kind of clown who screamed in righteous indignation about Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanaugh’s supposed “rape” (despite zero evidence, no corroborating witnesses and a “victim” who was clearly full of shit) YET she is ALL about voting for Joe Biden, whose perverted proclivities towards women and especially children is well documented.

Other nauseating hypocrite scumbags
^^^ Stephanie Fitzharris – artist’s rendition ^^^

Of course, it took the moron Fitzharris many, many tries to settle on Creepy Uncle Joe as her preferred choice. Prior to that, she was gung-ho about every other candidate at some point. Changing her mind like I change my underwear. This shows that she has ZERO ethics or guiding principles short of “gimme free stuff” and a love of Big Gov ordering us peons around and running our lives. She is the ULTIMATE Karen.

These are clearly the rantings of a lunatic who should not be allowed to vote. She should just go ahead and move to San Francisco. If I had my way, middle-aged, bloated-potato-headed, loons like this would be immediately deported to Cuba or Venezuela so they can enjoy their commie paradise. THIS is the face of a #Karen….THIS is the face of Marixism…THIS is the face of a clown who would destroy the last shreds of the Constitution.

I hate freedom. I hate the Constitution. I hate the Second Amendment. I love Big Government. I am Marxist parasite scum. This is my ‘serious’ face.

Yes, I’m Going To Ridicule This Thing.

I have to. Not just that outlandish neon-green-colored X but the entire “narrative” behind spending $15,000 on three letters in a parking lot: that tourists will flock here to take a picture on it and then hang around downtown to empty their wallets. It’s just too absurd to take seriously.

If they had just squandered $15k and tossed it up one day, I probably wouldn’t even notice or say a word. But this insistence that this is a tourist attraction can’t be ignored. It’s not. It never will be.

Mandy was very busy yesterday wearing out her # key on her keyboard and encouraging local Lampassholes “make your way downtown for some shopping, delicious eats & now some fun photo ops!”

That’s all well and good. I’m sure a few dozen of Mandy’s cheerleaders and friends of Misti/Delana/Kathy will head down there and dutifully comply. They’ll have a glass of wine, get tipsy and zany and take a photo on the letters. Then in a few weeks, all the hubbub will die down and it will sit there forevermore getting shat on by pigeons and vandalized at 2am by moron Lampassholes on methamphetamine. Then eventually a five-year-old child will climb that T, fall and crack their heads open and sue Finley for $500k. THAT’S the Lampasas way!

Also, having Friends of Mandy/Misti come down and spend money isn’t really the purpose of this neon-green contraption, is it? Since HOT (Hotel Occupancy Tax) funds were used for this, it is TECHNICALLY to attract OUTSIDE wallets and “put heads in beds”. I’d much rather see HOT funds used for things that ACTUALLY attract outside people like, say, Spring Ho or something.

But whatever. In the grand scheme of things the $15,000 they wasted on this is spit in the ocean compared to the LITERALLY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS they have wasted on other useless stuff – like the $1.5 million City council chambers and the $96,000 City council A/V system and the multi-million dollar corpse repository ‘business park’.

Oh, and they still can’t bother to offer anything above minimum wage to local kids working as lifeguards at the pool this summer. Definitely no money for that!! Clearly, money is way too tight – so, no pool for you!!

LEDC Meeting Today Is Open To All – Of Course, It’s At Noon When People With Real Jobs Have To Work…

The good news? You don’t have to sign up for Zoom to watch the LEDC discuss how they will spend their hundreds of thousand of tax dollars. You can actually attend the meeting at the $1.5 million dollar Fish Bowl IN PERSON today!

The bad news? There will NOT be an audio or visual live-stream or recording using the City’s $96,000 no-bid A/V system they paid for last year. Oh, and the meeting is at noon.

Yep. Noon.

I guess that’s cool if you have a government Nerf job posting #idiocy all day long. But for those of us with jobs and/or who own small businesses, it’s just a wee bit ludicrous.

The kicker: every single meeting in 2019 was at 5:30pm. The January meeting this year? At 5:30pm. The Feb meeting this year? Also at 5:30pm [page 3]. They were too scared of the sniffles to have a March meeting.

Every meeting in 2018 was held at 5:30pm also. Pretty much EVERY meeting in the sad history of the LEDC was at 5:30pm….until today.

So, it makes total sense the meeting is now being held at noon, right? What a bunch of d-bags.

I would love to know what the hell Mike Cour is going to “present” to the LEDC. Guess I’ll have to wait until June 17th to read the crappy, VERY brief minutes and make my best guess. Absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable, how the LEDC hides in the shadows.

HOW will we all survive today if Mandy Walsh isn’t at ‘work’ reposting Facebook posts from Putters and Gutters and the gym onto HER LEDC Facebook page?? Commerce in this town may just collapse and die!!

Miss Walsh…Tear Down This Wall

The LEDC will be meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) at the $1.5 million dollar Jack Calvert/Misti Talbert/Finley deGraffenreid Vanity Goldfish Bowl for their monthly pow-wow. We will finally get to see the minutes from the Feb 19th meeting, at least.

Will they EVER record their meeting audio and/or video using the City’s $96,000 A/V system that City council already uses twice a month? Will they make citizens sign up for some crappy third-party teleconferencing site like Zoom? Will they allow us to even SET FOOT in the $1.5 million building we paid for ever again?

How about it, Mandy? Finley? Misti? You have a very important agenda item this week: namely agenda item V: presentation by Mike Cour, who is apparently opening a tire recycling business in Lampasas, according to British industry magazines. He met with you all back in September 2019 as well. We’d all love to know what incentives and free stuff you are thinking of tossing his way.

The gauntlet is thrown: open up your meetings to the plebes and use the $96,000 no-bid A/V system that is sitting right there unused. Or would you rather keep more stuff hidden from prying eyes??