Well, I tried to take a relaxing day with the kids and enjoy the water slides at Kalahari yesterday. It was all well and good until late evening when the Dispatch electronic issue dumped into my email box. I should have let it lie there until today, but I saw the front page with “skate park” and “historic buildings” and I foolishly opened it up.
What I found was quite disgusting and enraging. FORMER council member “Greasy” Chris Harrison and FORMER mayor “Transparency” Talbert yammering total nonsense about the skate park.
Why a has-been council member and failed mayor are involved in this at ALL is beyond me. Doesn’t Talbert have enough on her plate wasting money in her $7 million dollar sandbox over on Highway 183? I guess not.
The skate park is a disaster that has been out of control for a while. Even Cathy “Pork Chop” Kuehne (who is almost as profligate a spender as Talbert) finally asked “how did it jump like that?”
You KNOW it’s getting stupid when Pork Chop arises from her slumber and asks some obvious questions.
Ya’ll remember the skate park, right? That’s the one that went from a $200,000 estimate in August of 2020 to a $400,000 estimate in August of 2021 (page 20):
Then Finley stood before council and lied right to their faces about it all…
City Manager Tells Blatant Lie To Council Without Blinking
First up to explain this train wreck was former council member “Greasy” Chris Harrison. Harrison hasn’t been on City council for years, so I have no idea why he was wheeled in to bloviate on this topic in the first place.
Chris is the guy who, while running for re-election to City council said: “To me, it’s not the government’s place to fund private business”.
Then after he left office, he whored himself out to developer S2M2 Inc and went to his good buddy and former council chum Misti Talbert to grab $185,000 in taxpayers’ money to “fund a private business” that he now happened to work for and which wanted a free detention pond built. The very same detention pond that Misti and council had said “NO” to before Greasy got hired on to lobby for them:
Anyways, I guess old Chris felt he owed a favor to Misti for getting him that big $185,000 check, so he was in the paper carrying water for her skate park disaster yesterday and trying to tell us why the costs exploded.
His brilliant answer?
Diesel.
Yeah, according to Chris: “Diesel went from $2 to $5.19”
This is complete horseshit, of course. Harrison is cherry-picking the dead-nut low price and the current ridiculous $5.19 price and blaming it all on that.
[Note: Waste Connections is a hell of a lot more “diesel sensitive” in the business of hauling garbage than the skate park is – and THEY are ‘only’ raising trash rates 8.8% – NOT doubling them. Hmmmmm]
The problem is that the original estimate was made in 2020 and the new “doubling of price” estimate was made the next year – LONG before diesel went parabolic.
Let’s see what diesel prices were in August of 2020 and then in August 2021 – which are the two dates the estimates were made (as you can see from City council’s own minutes):
We can see that diesel actually went from $2.37 to $3.45 during that time.
Harrison blaming the skate park cost doubling on diesel is like that moron Biden blaming high gas prices on Putin invading Ukraine. Sorry, but the damage was done LONG before all that.
Granted, that 45% increase sucks, but no way in hell that is to blame for a doubling of the skate park cost. I actually live in the real world and help run real businesses. The cost of everything has been screwing us too, but NOTHING has doubled in price in a year. We’ve had 15% increases, 25% increases and some 30% increases – but NOTHING has doubled.
The skate park fiasco is not due to “diesel”. The skate park fiasco is the result of YEARS AND YEARS of a culture of incompetence and unaccountability on the part of Finley deGraffenreid and City council. It is the result of a council that rubber-stamped any and all project cost increases with zero discussion or interest in knowing why.
It is also the result of a City council heavily populated by idiots like Chuck Williamson and Cathy Kuehne who have never worked in the private sector in their lives and do not value a tax dollar properly.
Their attitude for YEARS, no matter what the project cost overrun (and there have been MANY), was always “well, it’s just another [fill in amount], we can’t stop now”.
Over and over and over again, ridiculous bungling, cost overruns and fiscal waste were left unmentioned and unpunished. Everyone just went back to the Magic Money Tree to pay for all the stupidity. Wildly overpriced elevators, selling a building for $75k and buying it back for $225k, paying $96,000 for a $33,000 A/V system, not bothering to get bids on bathroom construction, etc, etc, etc. It has been going on for YEARS!
I can almost hear Talbert sitting in on this skate park discussion (where she had no business being in the first place – you are a FORMER council member, sugar) and blabbering something like “well, it’s only another $90,000 and we have to get this done”.
This is known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy and it is why the shitty Business Pork is STILL going strong and wasting $7 million over 20 years despite not a single prospect showing any interest in the damn thing.
Then our Parks Director made a ridiculous statement too! Here is what Chris Eicher had to say in the newspaper:
“We knew if we wanted a $300,000 skate park, we would have to budget $400,000. That’s just the way it is”
Huh? Ummm, no. If you know it’s going to be $400,000 then you SAY it’s going to be $400,000. Anything else is bordering on fraud as you give a bullshit low-ball number to get your project passed and then admit the “real” much-higher number later. I can’t believe he actually said that out loud. It reeks of dishonesty or incompetence, I’m not sure which.
The whole fiasco wouldn’t be complete without a zinger from Finley himself. Here is his brilliant addition to the anaylsis:
“The only thing I can guarantee is that the exact cost will be different than budgeted”
THAT is the wizard who is supposed to be on top of things and who costs the city around $200,000 per year for his “expertise”. For 25 years he has been working in the government sector doing this shit, but hey – don’t expect him to have a fucking clue either!