Hard to believe a year flew past already! It’s been exactly a year since some City employees and the recently-departed Stacy Ybarra wasted an entire paid day on a junket to Mineral Wells.
A year later? Ybarra gone, no new EDC Director, no tenants in the Business Pork and the LEDC is disarray. THAT was money and time well-spent! Here’s a reprint of the post I made on 9/21/23:
If you wonder what your overpaid City employees do all day, look no further than their Facebook post from yesterday:
Mineral Wells is about a two hour drive straight north of us. They are a suburb about 45 minutes west of Forth Worth. Why they chose this place (other than having a “history deeply rooted in mineral springs”) is beyond me.
Is that the new pivot for Ybarra? Push Lampasas as a “therapeutic mineral springs” destination? Who knows. But she has to do SOMETHING to look busy all the time, I guess.
She tossed a nice word salad about the trip, that’s for sure. She’s not on Finley’s level yet with his “leveraging enterprise funds” or “stakeholder visions,” but she threw out a couple of nice meaningless bullshit buzzwords like “innovative economic strategies” and “benefit-driven projects.”
I’ll say something else about Ybarra: she is clearly quite literate. She knows when to properly hyphenate two words when used as an adjective. She nailed it on “community-led” and also on “benefit-driven.” You would NEVER see that shit with Ryan Ward, who writes like a Ritalin-addled third grader.
See what I did there with the hyphen as a little joke reinforcing the whole hyphen discussion? I bet Ybarra will get it when she reads this.
But Ybarra did leave out some information. I’d LOVE to know more about these “innovative economic strategies” she speaks of. Because according to Wikipedia, the City of Mineral Wells lost 12% of their population between the year 2010 and 2020. They went from 16,788 down to 14,720.
Ouch. Maybe those “economic strategies” weren’t so innovative after all.
So who wasted their entire day on this ridiculous and useless junket? Some of the usual suspects…
On the right we have TJ Monroe. Former mayor and current board member of the Lampasas Economic Development Corp. In fact, she has been sitting on the LEDC board since back when they invented milk.
In the middle is Economic Development Director Stacey Ybarra, who always has a shit-eating grin on her face reminiscent of a second grader who heard a loud fart in class and can’t stop giggling over it. She is also inexplicably wearing a shirt celebrating a team currently occupying the cellar in the AL East division. Oh well – marginally better than a Yankees shirt, I suppose.
On the far left is City secretary Becky Sims. I’m not sure why she’s there except to take a paid day off work to galivant around another town and get a free lunch.
I’m not sure who the other bird is, but she appears to be wearing Badger Blue, so she must be one of ours. She’s not a City Big Wig though.
Ybarra and Sims cost the taxpayer roughly $900 per work day between the two of them, so I hope the trip was super duper informative and will yield LOTS of brilliant “economic strategies” to implement here in Lampasas.
You know, there IS one thing they can learn from Mineral Wells: looking at their City organizational chart (page 8), we can see that this town of 12,000 has NO IT DEPARTMENT – like many, many other towns our size. Lampasas could definitely outsource that stuff and save hundreds of thousands per year!
But we already knew that from four years ago.
REMINDER:
Current number of days the $7.2 million dollar “Business Park” has been completely empty and devoid of tenants: 7,122 7,487