Just don’t call it a remodel or a renovation. Those are “no no” words and conjure up memories of the $1,500,000 Old City Hall REMODEL fuckups back in 2017/2018/2019.
(As a reminder, the Old City Hall remodel was originally supposed to cost $350,000 and they thought THAT was too much! Final cost: well over $1.5 million)
You can call it a “rehabilitation” or a “refresh” or “redesign” if you like. I call it a giant cock up the ass of the taxpayers.
Remember: the Hostess House only brings in about $12,000 per year after expenses. They could literally just take that $2.2 million and throw it into t-bills and make 10x the return.
In case you forgot how we got here:
In the fall of 2019, the City took over the building from the DAR. According to them, it just needed some “minor repairs” and “minor decorations”…..
THEN it jumped up to “about $200,000”, according to City Manager Finley deGraffenreid in the Lampasas Dispatch in March 2021:
[But when computing things using FinleyMath(TM), you ALWAYS have to add a zero at the end. Like owning a boat. That $3 bracket for your home ends up costing $30 at the marine depot! It has happened over and over and over again. Thus, $200,000 becomes $2,000,000]
THEN it ballooned to $1,308,670 – which is a sick joke all by itself. Morons like Cathy “Pork Chop” 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!
THEN it jumped again up to $1,879,483.55 [see page 67]
“Scope creep” means dummy council members throwing in everything on their wish list.
But wait…there’s more!
It jumped YET AGAIN to $2.15 million!
Then last February, City council dropped a load in their panties as they saw bids come in even higher than their ridiculous estimates:
So they had to go back to the drawing board. This, of course, costs MORE money to “revise” stuff as they decided to take out to 24k-gold toilets and diamond-crusted doorknobs….
Now they will probably pay $2.2 million and tell us it’s a DEAL because that is DOWN from the $2.97 million estimate last year! See how it works? No mention that it’s actually TEN TIMES MORE than they budgeted. Actually, probably 30 times more, since it originally was just “minor repairs,” they assured us.
Prediction: this will pass at $2.2 million on Monday night…but halfway through the construction, a LOT of new charges will come in as the contractor “surprisingly” finds issues nobody knew was there. These are called “change orders” and it’s the oldest trick in the book to grab more money from a government that is now trapped.
Since there will be no turning back at that point, the City will pay all that shit too. I’ll guess it’s another $100,000 at a minimum.