According to the last LEDC minutes:
Board member Finney moved to approve budget amendment to pay off debt in the amount of $220,019… the motion was seconded by Board member Ball and with unanimous vote, the motion carried.
You’ll recall, board member Finney is the new blood that Porkchop Kuehne and Talbert fought tooth and nail to AVOID letting into their clique a few months ago. He also recently made noise to appraise and possibly sell off Lot 4 (around 80 acres) of the Goat Pasture.
Weird how ONE new person can come in and get things moving again when a small group of dipshidiots have been screwing them up for 20 years. It reminds me of Elon Musk and DOGE coming in and immediately seeing massive amounts of graft, retardation and incompetence costing the taxpayers a small fortune and then making a bunch of common-sense fixes to save a ton. As much as I dislike Finney for his Stone Valley electrical hook-up scam he ran, you can’t deny he is in there now fixing things at least a little bit.
Also weird is that the $220k they want to pay down is pretty close to the $207,000 in ADDITIONAL MONEY these morons saddled the taxpayer with nearly five years ago with a very stupid and inexplicable decision to extend an existing loan for another ten years! Naturally, I wrote about this back in June of 2021:
LEDC Loan Costs Now Much Higher For Taxpayer Thanks To Idiotic Extension Of Original Loan
As I wrote at the time:
…the OLD loan only had about $133,000 remaining in interest payments over the next 9 years (total interest of $377,000 minus the $244,000 already paid over the last 6 years).
That is now out the window. The balance of the ORIGINAL loan ($885,652.00) will now be re-amortized at the old interest rate of 3.35% and extended another ten years –which will cost the taxpayers $340,882
So the LEDC went from only owing another $133k to now owing $340k in interest over the life of that $1.35 million dollar loan- thus fattening bank coffers by an additionalroughly $207,000 in tax dollars.
In other news, Forward Lampasas is now officially a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Eddie Bowden and his crew have really taken the reigns over there and are shaking things up. They had a creek cleanup/brush burn about a month ago and they realize the creek is a huge asset that has been ignored. I just hope they are smart enough to keep that moron Stephanie Fitzharris off of any boards or decision-making teams.
Imagine what could have been accomplished with the million dollars of Covid money Talbert pilfered for her goat pasture a couple years ago? Or the other $6.5 million wasted on the goat pasture? Such a colossal waste of money.
So sad.
It’s nice to se MEN OF ACTION like Bowden, Finney and Mike Irvin take charge and take the steering wheel AWAY from proven failures like Talbert, Monroe and Kuehne. The City will be FAR better off in the long run.