Well, I did NOT see that one coming!
I had a lot of stuff on my Bingo card this year. Stuff like ‘Haywood grows fatter on Whataburger’ and ‘skate park delayed’ and “Hostess House cost overruns” but never in a million years did I see this happening. This is like Michael Scott quitting Dunder Mifflin just months before they open a new branch.
The “new branch about to open” in this case would be the much-ballyhooed Business Pork project. It will supposedly be done in just a few months and Mandy Walsh resigns before the Great Unveiling? After she has undoubtedly put hundreds of hours of blood, sweat and tears into it? After dealing with vermin like Mike Cour? She leaves now?
Hmmm. Very odd, to say the least.
As I’ve said in the past, she was given an impossible task…as was Kathi Masonheimer before her. As much as I love this small town, it’s just that: another small town. There are a hundred more like us in Texas, and to think that wasting $7 million on a “business park” is going to turn us into the next Georgetown is moronic. The LEDC shouldn’t exist. The Business Pork shouldn’t exist. The free market is superior at guiding growth – not a small group of self-appointed people blowing tax dollars.
The wave of morons spreading out from Austin northwards will not move faster or slower because of the LEDC or Mandy Walsh. When it finally gets here, methinks we’ll all be sorry we got the “growth” that Talbert longs for.
Anyways, looks like the impossibility of this position took another scalp. I hope Mandy succeeds wildly in her new private sector position. The next economic director will likely take forever to get up to speed on everything. At least this gives Talbert a convenient excuse in a year as to why the business pork still sits empty.
R.I.P.
Cherry Hargrove (2010? – June 26, 2013)
Kathi Masonheimer (March 2014 – 2017)
Mandy Walsh (Feb 13, 2017 – Oct 5, 2022)
Reminder #1: in 2014, Kathi Masonheimer told us that all they needed was to run utilities to the business park and they’d be on easy street. That was 8.5 years ago!
“We get at least a lead a week from the governor’s office, and every one of the prospective companies want land with infrastructure already in place,” the new Lampasas official said. “Having available land with infrastructure makes it so much easier to attract those primary job manufacturing businesses.
So, City council spent over a million bucks to “have land available with infrastructure” in 2014 and 2015. Yet the park has sat empty since then. What happened to that “lead a week’ bullshit? Ah yes. It was all nonsense.
Today is the start of Q4 2022 – or exactly SEVEN YEARS LATER.No businesses have shown interest in this corpse repository.
Reminder #2: The 5.6-acre ‘Industrial Park’ still sits empty and Martin Custom & Rod has STILL not made any agreements with the City to move in there – ONE YEAR after the deal was first proposed. I think we can consider that deal DEAD.