Holy shit.
Cathy “Even If It Costs a Little More” Kuehne better start practicing her “shocked face” in the mirror this weekend between bites of pork chop panko…she’s going to need to use it at Monday’s council meeting.
The art-teacher-who-would-be-mayor is likely soiling her undergarments right now as she realizes that she and the other profligate spenders on City council are now very much painted into a corner.
I cannot wait to hear her ridiculous “how did this happen?” bleats on Monday evening as she tries to pretend she had nothing to do with any of this.
“How could we have known?” they will cry out in disbelief!
How indeed.
If you’d listened to this blog and the “cowardly keyboard warrior” who called it from the start, you would have been prepared for this.
Here is an excerpt from my blog post last October – Old City Hall 2.0: Hostess House Costs EXPLODE To $1.88 Million! Up 44% From Last Estimate!!
I wrote:
I warned you! I warned you over and over and over. I laughed when the Hostess House “minor repairs” were first talked about….
That was exactly three years ago. Just some “minor repairs” and “minor decorations”. Yeah, sure. I called bullshit. I reminded you of the Old City Hall debacle and the $1.6 million spent on that vanity project (soon to be $1.85 million) – a pet project of Misti Talbert’s.
THEN it jumped up to “about $200,000”, according to City Manager Finley deGraffenreid in the Lampasas Dispatch in March 2021 – a mere 18 months ago:
Council picks architecture firm for Hostess House upgrades
THEN it ballooned to $1,308,670 – which is a sick joke all by itself. Morons like Cathy Kuehne said they should keep the historical look “even if it costs more”. Why not? It’s not her money! It’s just play money, apparently!
But I knew from years of watching these clowns that it wouldn’t stop at $1.3 million. No way. As of today, the costs have exploded once again…as they ALWAYS DO. That’s what happens when chimpanzees get ahold of somebody else’s checkbook.
The NEW estimate is $1.879,483.55 [see page 67]
My god. It turned out to be even worse than I imagined back then. I guess we aren’t stopping at $1.88 million either. RKJ [of bungled OCH elevator fame] was the LOWER of the two bids at a hair under $3,000,000.00
Three million. You could build 6 nice houses for that money. At this point, you might want to just have the Hostess House hit by Jewish lightning after making sure it is fully insured.
Three million for an “event venue” that MIGHT bring in $12,000 per year AT MOST to the City coffers. So it will only take 250 years to break even on this project. I remember not too many years ago morons like Bruce Haywood were saying the City should build an entire civic center from scratch and that it would only cost about $2.5 million.
Now the question is: why didn’t Reliance Architecture (who has ALREADY been paid a TON OF MONEY to “manage” this debacle) have a better estimate of the costs?
Here we are again.
There is no way in hell they can accept these bids. They will have to be rejected. Then what?
Monday night should be fun.