Assistant to the City Manager Ryan “Dwight Schrute” Ward has come up with yet another brilliant idea. If you thought the “lose-weight-to-get-time-off” scheme was a good one, wait til you hear this!
To say that Ryan Ward writes incoherently is putting it mildly. Sometimes I consider changing his nickname to Forrest Gump. If you ever heard him speak at City council meetings, you’d understand why.
Here is his suggestion:
You can see this on page 141 of the latest council packet.
Let’s ignore for a moment that the very first sentence makes zero sense grammatically. I have no idea what he’s trying to say. Then again, what do we expect from a guy who costs the taxpayers a paltry $155,000 per year? If you want someone who can write and explain at an 8th-grade level (and knows how to use apostrophes properly), that’s gonna cost you more!
So as far as I can tell, the gist is this: whoever has to keep track of employees’ time off (Dwight himself plus like 6 or 8 other people) is too lazy to spend “numerous hours” every month doing this minor task. Finley and Dwight cost the taxpayer $378,000 per year in salaries and benefits – but apparently spending a little time every month doing some paperwork that is in their job description is beneath them – despite the fact it has been this way for decades.
How many hours is “numerous”? Well, he has a convoluted spreadsheet to explain all this, but I’ll be damned if it makes any sense. These clowns at the top of the food chain are salaried, so breaking down every little task they do on an hourly basis makes zero sense.
So many people needed to record the time off! Staff, managers (plural), HR coordinators (plural), accountant, finance director, City manager and Assistant to the City manager! Whew. Could be as many as NINE people involved in this operation!
If you have nine different people wasting 11.5 hours every two weeks JUST to jot down the “requests for time off” for a few employees, then you are doing it wrong. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
Then again, this is Lampasas City government. The same government that sold a building for $75,000 and then bought it back 15 months later for $229,000. The same government that loses over $10,000 per year on their “recycling” program but then says it provides “tremendous value”.
No, I’m not making that up.
So, in order to save ourselves a few grand of Dwight Schrute’s precious time every year, we must now do the following:
- Blow $30,509 with Tyler Technologies to get the software and touchscreens and all the other shit.
- Blow $8,339 EVERY YEAR for the privilege of using this software. And if history is any guide, this cost will go up 5% a year without fail. Why? Because after they get you reliant on this UNNECESSARY fancy toy, they know the government won’t give it up for a couple hundred extra measly dollars every year. So it will be $8,755 next year, $9,200 the year after that, $9,600 the year after that, etc, etc. I have seen Tyler Technologies do this over and over with the City with every piece of software they sell. It’s a tremendously good scam for whoever owns Tyler Technologies.
- Blow an undisclosed sum on “third-party timeclocks, badges and a badge print device”
As someone who has helped run small businesses, I can also tell you that all these timeclocks and badges and badge printing devices and software will constantly fuck up and require our IT ‘experts’ to waste hours and hours dicking around with them. Did Dwight put THAT into his equations?
Doubtful.
My guess? City council will OK this expenditure with roughly 2 minutes of discussion. I will also predict that the “recurring charge” for the exact same software next year will be about $8,750. Any takers??
I have some ideas for saving the City money! Here they are:
Fire Ryan Ward. This saves the City $155,000 or so every single year.
Second derivative effects: with Ryan Ward gone, the City no longer blows $30,000 or $50,000 on a bunch of stupid ideas every year like $5 greens fees, losing weight for PTO and $40,000 software rip-offs to save a few hours of time every month.