Apparently, Misti Talbert loves inbreeding even more than the British monarchy. I say this because the LEDC just continued its tradition of appointing people to the LEDC board who have (a) already proven to be completely incompetent by their actions over the last decade (Hudson, Schaub) or who represent an obvious conflict of interest because they currently/previously sit on City council (TJ Monroe and Misti Talbert herself) and are overseeing the very board they sit on.
It’s a group of the same names over and over for the last 15 years – and they do nothing but fuck things up, waste money and spin their wheels.
But Misti just took the inbreeding to the next level.
You’ll remember that recently the LEDC opened up the application process to find some new board members. I wrote about it last month because our old friend Comrade Clayton Tucker (local socialist bum and chairwoman of the Lampasas County Democrats) had applied.
Ronnie Vineyard, Roland Schaub, Steve Hudson (those three have been involved with the LEDC forever and have proven themselves incapable), Tim Hefley, Jami Sanchez, Kathy Crawford, Michael Sibberson, and Comrade Clayton Tucker.
So they had FIVE brand new names to choose from. Five people who HAVEN’T been involved in the LEDC shit show for the last 17 years. You know what name WASN’T on that list of applicants last month? Ryan Shahan.
So Talbert recommended someone who WASN’T EVEN ON THE LIST OF APPLICANTS (Shahan)!! Her logic?
“Talbert advised that it makes good business sense to have a member with a financial background to be on the board”
Pardon me, but Misti Talbert wouldn’t know good business sense if it jumped up and bit her on the ass. She is an imbecile.
New LEDC board member Sid Ball agreed with Talbert’s assessment.
Really? You apparently haven’t had anyone with a “financial background” on the LEDC board for the last 17 years – why change things now? Are you admitting you are all in way over your heads and have bungled everything for the last 17 years? Because I would definitely agree heartily with that notion. I’m just shocked to hear her tacitly admit it!
Sid Ball then moved to REAPPOINT two of the three numb nuts whose terms were up (Hudson and Schaub) and to appoint Ryan Shahan for the third open position [page 3 – bottom of the page].
I guess Ronnie Vineyard just got the boot. The LEDC agreed unanimously, with Ronnie Vineyard as the one board member who didn’t want to give Ronnie Vineyard the boot – LOL.
Apparently Vineyard wants to stay on the LEDC until the day he dies. He must be a serial arsonist who enjoys lighting money on fire. Pretty shocking his buddies gave him the heave-ho this time around. He must have pissed somebody off because he has been there for a long, long time.
The kicker? One of the applicants (Tim Hefley) listed his experience as “construction management” and has worked in the private sector for a long time. Yeah, you don’t want a guy like that on the board as you embark on yet ANOTHER phase of the “business park” construction project.
You almost have to admire the chutzpah and lack of self-awareness. Not to mention the complete lack of understanding between cause and effect:
Not a business.
This is very rich coming from a raging left-wing loon who (with the help of election fraud) put a demented, green-new-deal-loving, corrupt, pants-shitting retard into the White House.
Every REAL small business is struggling now with supplies, inflation and a tight labor market thanks to Biden’s idiotic mandates and policies. But fake business owner Julie Cain Landrum (who employs nobody at all and who is open only a few days a week) wants you to help her out.
Yeah, I’ll help you out: fuck Wool & Vine. If you were drowning, I’d throw you a cinder block.
I AM however, going to send you a nice Christmas present, just like I did last year. Hang it on your tree with pride.
Time for a deep dive into what our $426,000 Information Technology Department does all month.
When IT Director Monica Wright submits her monthly reports, we are treated to a ticket count. Every time something happens over there, a ticket is generated and that task is then completed by either Monica Wright (Department head with no network credentials) or Kristy Acevedo, the network administrator.
The ticket count looks large and impressive. Like Ron Jeremy in ultra HD on a 70-inch TV, perhaps. But are they REALLY doing that much work? I was curious.
I recently requested a list of all tickets generated in September of 2021. Boy, was it an eye-opener. Especially since City council just agreed to give the IT Department ANOTHER $90,000 over last year’s budget to hire ANOTHER IT person! They must be super busy over there, right? They generated FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX tickets in September!
Wow. That’s a lot! That’s like 14 tickets every single day, including weekends! Such busy little bees they are!
Or is something else going on here? Each ticket shows a category (email, backups, hardware problem, etc) and a time stamp. With this, I was able to draw some conclusions.
Here is my breakdown of categories so far (I will break this down further as I have time):
Unspecified or left blank:68 tickets (16%) had either no information on the category or said “unspecified”. So we literally have no record or idea of what they were doing on 16% of these tickets.
Acevedo managed to generate 9 tickets (2% of monthly total) instantaneously at 6:25pm doing [?]. Considering this was after hours, likely an automated event. We will never know.
Backups: 157 tickets (37%). One thing I noticed immediately is there were quite a few tickets generated in the wee hours of the morning, when there is no way in hell anybody was working. These are almost exclusively “backups” and they are clearly generated automatically. Maybe they call that “working” in the government sector, but not in the real world.
Can you imagine telling your boss you worked all night when you were REALLY asleep and then pointing to your ice maker which made cubes all night automatically and saying “see! Look what I did!”
“Working” while sleeping = Nerf job
Definition of “Nerf job” = automatic backups every evening at 4:30pm
So a whopping 1/3 of all their “work” is backups and a goodly portion of that takes place in the middle of the night. Another big chunk of those happen at the end of the day. Many times, I saw 10 or 12 tickets generated between 4:30pm and 4:45pm. In other words, sitting there at the end of the day and watching the machines backup data. Ain’t government work grand?
So we can already see that 53% of the tickets (255 out of 426) we either have no idea what they were doing OR the ticket was just noting an automated backup of data – many times in the middle of the night.
Ouch. We’re now down to 171 tickets for the month – between TWO people. Not so impressive anymore. Less than 3 tickets per worker per day, if you include weekends (we’ll get to that too).
A/V System: 16 tickets (3.7%). This mainly happened on days where a City council meeting was going to take place that night (twice a month). Monica managed to milk 12 tickets in 13 minutes for “A/V System”. Then as you can see, everyone took a nice, long siesta until the automated backups started at 4:30pm:
Tough day of Nerf work
Facebook/Twitter/Website: 13 tickets (3%). I assume this is going to the City website and updating something – like a job opening or announcement. Super hard work.
Printer toner: 4 tickets (<1%): I made jokes over the last three years about Monica going around changing printer cartridges. It appears to be partially true. Hard to believe that a grown adult as head of another department (City Hall, Library) can’t change printer ink themselves, but apparently that’s the case.
We are now up to 288 tickets in the “pretty much a joke and anyone with a pulse can do it” category. That’s 67% so far – or 2/3 of their “work” for the month.
Continuing on….
Antivirus, cybersecurity, firewall, malware: 19 tickets (4.5%). OK, now we’re talking! Good to see they spend 4.5% of their time on the combo of antivirus (10 tickets), cybersecurity (7 tickets), firewall (1 ticket) and malware/worm (1 ticket). Of course, this is AFTER they allowed ransomware onto the system a couple years ago resulting in the destruction of roughly $40,000 in City computer equipment.
Did I mention that some of the “antivirus” work took place in the middle of the night? It did. More automation masquerading as “work” (making the ice cubes!):
The kicker? The IT Department ALSO paid our old friends TSM Consulting$7,631 last month for “Panda antivirus”! Like I have said a million times before, we ALREADY HAVE three people in the IT department: Wright, Acevedo and TSM Consulting, who makes tens of thousands of dollars per year to do the work our IT Department is incapable of doing.
Police Department: 61 tickets (14%). Not a surprise. The police department has a lot of equipment, body cams, mobile laptops, printers, etc. Of these 61 tickets, however, 20 of the tickets were “backup” events – and thus automated and already counted above in the “backups” category. The other 41 tickets (9.6% of total for the month) were things like software problems, software install, printer install, etc.
HOWEVER, don’t forget: two years ago (immediately after the ransomware fuckup by the IT Department) the police department took a LOT of responsibility OUT of the hands of the IT Department! They have spent over $28,000 with WatchGuard to store all body cam footage since then – and will continue to spend $10,620 per year for this service going forward [page 10, column 4, paragraph 2 onwards]
So, everything to do with bodycam recording, storage, backups and data manipulation SHOULD be taken care of by this $10,620 per year contract. Ergo, the IT Department presence over there should be limited to very basic events like printer installation and other small problems – NOT the job of backing up or dealing with bodycam data.
Now we get to the meat and potatoes. The following is the stuff you probably think of when you think of what the IT Department spends all day doing. It amounts to 44 tickets total – or only 10% of their recorded tasks.
Software install (4), software config (7), software problem (14), software update (9): 34 tickets total (8%). Of these 34 tickets, Acevedo handled 29 of them – or 85%. This reinforces my view that Acevedo is the only one with rudimentary computer knowledge in the “department”.
Of course, it could ALSO be due to the fact that Monica didn’t appear on ANY tickets between the 17th and the 22nd. No doubt on one of her MANY vacations. She DOES get 4 weeks vacation AND 2.5 weeks of sick/personal days every year.
Hardware install (2), hardware config (1), hardware problem (7): 10 tickets total (2.3%). Of these 10 tickets, Acevedo handled 9 of them. This also reinforces my suspicions that Monica doesn’t really get her hands dirty. She costs the taxpayers six figures because (1) she has been there forever (2) holds a title, no matter how undeserved (3) good at looking busy and generating tickets that actually don’t accomplish much.
The final kicker?? Despite it appearing (from the tickets) that Wright and Acevedo take care of “antivirus”, they actually paid our old friends TSM Consulting $7,631 last month for “Panda antivirus”.
You ain’t scared of no one? Buddy, with your diminutive height and twiggy arms, you should be scared of everyone…including teen girls.
He then continued his hillbilly-bonics speech pattern:
Hey now! Don’t forget he ALSO ran unsuccessfully for Texas House District 54. That’s a three-time loser, for those keeping score:
Contrary to his declaration that he “ain’t scared of nobody”, he was apparently too scared to face a primary opponent and withdrew from the race before it even really got started.
He is also petrified of the Wuhan respiratory virus – even though he is at practically zero risk as an under-35-yo female. So scared, he got several vax shots AND still wears a mask!
He’s scared of other stuff too. Like paying his own way in life and earning an honest living:
Hey dummy – the hospital is STILL going to bill someone. There is no freedom from the bill. You just want someone else to pay it.
What he REALLY means here is “freedom from responsibility” and freedom to mooch off of others the same way he mooches off his parents by living in their upstairs bedroom at 208 S Western Street.
He means freedom to fuck around traveling on mom and dad’s dime and finding his inner self and posing with pachyderms. Notice there is no mention of ranching, farming or being a cowboy in his biographical notes:
Teacher? No. Babysitter for 9 months to a kindergarten class in CHINA.
With these latest antics, Clayton Tucker proves once again he ain’t (see what I did there?) a rancher or a farmer or a cowboy or any kind of rugged, salt-of-the-earth, hardscrabble laborer. He’s just a doughy, pasty, effeminate trust fund nerd who still lives at mom and dad’s house and worships Bernie Sanders.
Sad little boy. A complete embarrassment to the fine town of Lampasas.
Prices of everything are soaring due to uncontrolled inflation.
Cargo ships are sitting off the coasts of our major ports unable to unload while the Secretary of Transportation took two months off for paternity leave.
People are refusing to work because they’re getting paid more by the government not to work.
Cops, nurses, firefighters, corrections officers, and other “essential workers” who were heralded as heroes during the pandemic are being fired for not getting a vaccine that they don’t need or want, while the Biden administration cheers it on.
Vaccine mandates prevent people from going to stores and restaurants, and will soon prevent you from flying on planes and sending your kids to school.
Dissenting voices are being banned from social media platforms and spied on by the federal government.
Thirteen marines were killed by terrorists as a result of a poorly planned evacuation from Afghanistan, and we responded by killing cars full of innocent Afghan children.
Our southern border is non-existent, and every day thousands of unvaccinated illegal immigrants flood into our country before being distributed around the nation where they can remain for the rest of their lives and collect off the taxpayers.
Critical race theory and transgenderism are being pushed on our children in schools, and some girls are getting raped in the bathroom by boys in skirts
Parents who complain about the state of public schools are being labeled as domestic terrorists by the federal government, and the Justice Department has directed the FBI to investigate them
January 6 is being used by the government to curtail civil liberties of American citizens in the name of public safety, despite the fact that the only person killed on that day was Ashli Babbitt
We have no idea who is even running the country, as our elected President is not allowed to answer questions from the press
Who approved this? That would be the school board. They have given out some huge raises like Halloween candy for years now. It’s all been covered here ad nauseum. Here is a reprint of a blog from June of this year:
April 2018: The Lampasas Independent School District Board of Trustees unanimously approved a general pay increase for all the district’s teachers, administrators and auxiliary staff. Each teacher will receive a $1,500 increase, a raise of about 3% will go to administrators, and an increase of about 5% will be given to aides, clerical and auxiliary staff. The pay raise will add about $800,000 to the budget.
July 2019: The Lampasas Independent School District Board of Trustees approved teacher raises totaling $1.5 million for the coming school year.
March 2020: Our school board approved a compensation plan for next yearthat includes a 7% general pay increase of the midpoint for teachers, clerical/aides, and auxiliary. A general pay increase of 5% of the midpoint for administratorswas approved as well.
January 2021: The Lampasas Independent School District Board of Trustees voted Monday night to extend Superintendent Dr. Chane Rascoe’s contract, which now is set to expire in June 2024. Trustees also granted Rascoe a 7% raise, bringing his salary to $169,864 as of July 1. In addition, trustees voted to give all school district employees an additional 10 days of paid leave for “COVID-19- related issues”.
April 8, 2022: Superintendent Dr. Chane Rascoe recommended a plan that includes a general pay increase of 3% of the midpoint salary for administrators and teachers, and an increase of 4% of the midpoint range for aides, clerical and auxiliary staff.
Rascoe said that would put starting teacher pay at $48,925, up from the current $47,500 salary for new teachers.
Trustee Sam Walker offered an amended proposal that would move starting teacher pay to $49,000 and add $75 to each step in the salary schedule. The 3% and 4% pay increases would be calculated from these new figures.
The board approved Walker’s plan by unanimous vote.
Funny how the cost to run the schools goes up massively over time but teachers always seem to be underpaid and school performance seems to be flat.
I wonder where it all goes? The answer: paper pushers and administrative bloat. Not to mention wildly overpaid figureheads like Chane Rascoe:
It goes to ridiculous titles like “educational diagnostician”, “assistant superintendent”, “District Instr Pgm Director Or Exc Dir” and “occupational therapist”. These people make big money – and educate nobody at all.
If you have the word “assistant” in front of your job title, chances are you are superfluous and could be let go tomorrow with zero effect on the kids’ learning.
HOW IT WAS IN THE OLD DAYS. OLD GUY RANT COMING UP….
Let me take you back to the 1970s when I was just a little Lampasshole. I went to a school with grade 1 through 8. Each class had 30 kids. We sat in rows in desks starting in FIRST GRADE and there was no fucking around – even though class sizes were 50% bigger than today. None of this “collaborative learning” sitting at tables and jerking around. You swam or sank on your own steam.
My Dad informed me it cost $600 each per year to send us to that private school. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $4,500 today. I’ll call it $5,000 to be charitable. Lampasas spends well over $10,000 per student now. DOUBLE what it cost when I was a kid.
How the hell did we do it back then?? Well, there was no administrative bloat or armies of paper pushers, that’s how. We didn’t have psychiatrists and counselors and all that horseshit. Your counseling took place at recess with kids much older than you – and it was Lord of the Flies (we read that in 3rd grade – bet they don’t even bother now). When you were in fifth grade and having recess with the eighth graders in a dodgeball game, you learned how to fend for yourself – not cry to the teacher about a cyber-bully or some such nonsense.
There was one teacher in each class (8 teachers) and one sub who would come in if anyone was sick. We had ONE principal and that was it. No assistants or aides or anything else. She had a paddle on her wall and she used it judiciously.
There was ONE secretary and her mimeograph machine. That was it. No computers or laptops or iPads or other bullshit…EVERYTHING was done by hand back then – all the grading and all the report cards…done by a single secretary and her stinky mimeograph machine.
We had actual chalk chalkboards and a single little in-window A/C unit in each classroom that they rarely ran. This was Catholic school but they certainly were Jews when it came to paying for electricity for the air conditioning. It had to be over 95 for them to turn it on.
We had one P/E teacher and one custodian. We had a very small library and one librarian. THAT WAS IT. A grand total of about 13 employees ran that school of 240 kids – a ratio of 18.5 kids to employees.
Here in Lampasas, there are about 3,300 kids and over FIVE HUNDRED employees. A ratio of 6.6 kids to employees. Pretty much TRIPLE the administrative bloat. Here is that chart again:
Also remember there was no federal Department of Education at this time. That asshole Carter didn’t implement that until 1980 or so. Gee – how did we EVER get along with THAT??
You know what else we didn’t have back then? Laptops. We managed to learn from BOOKS and a chalkboard! Lest you tell me “well, laptops and computer learning are more efficient!”, I will have to call bullshit. The Lampasas ISD has spent over ONE MILLION DOLLARS on laptops since 2017. There has been ZERO improvement in results.
[They spent $361,000 in 2017, $300,000 in 2018 and $348,000 this year]
I also GUARANTEE you we were better educated back then. Take a look at a grade school test from the 60s or 70s. It probably looks like high school-level stuff now. That’s how dumbed-down everything has gotten:
I doubt most of the students at Austin Community College could pass this even WITH a calculator. They’re too busy crying about what pronoun they want to be called by and blathering about social justice. Then they wonder why they get their “degree” that says they are “educated” and they end up right back pouring coffee at Starbucks.
They are in that boat because from first grade on, they were coddled by a bunch of useless paper pushers instead of EDUCATED and smacked when they got out of line. They never learned that the world doesn’t run on their fucking feelings.
Lampasshole solution? Less $170,000 administrators, more paddling of asses and more shaming when tests are failed.
The 30-year-old, able-bodied unemployed bum who lives upstairs at his parents’ house at 208 S Western Street STILL thinks there was an “insurrection” on January 6th. He thinks Louis Gohmert is an “embarrassment” who “needs to go”:
Why would he think this? Why does socialist Clayton Tucker cling to the falsehood that there was an “insurrection” on January 6th? After all, none other than the nation’s Attorney General admitted a few days ago that not a SINGLE ONE of the people charged on Jan 6th were charged with “insurrection” after Louis Gohmert himself made Garland look like a complete fool on national TV. Not one. That is a pile of made-up bullshit the dems keep repeating like parrots in order to draw away from the fact they stole an election last November.
He believes it because he is a very, very dumb person.
Socialist bum Clayton Tucker gets his information from a website called “Texas Signal” – a sad liberal fishwrapper run by fellow commies. THEY got THEIR information from a Rolling Stone article that was sourced by….wait for it…”anonymous sources”:
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-1) was one of several Republican members of Congress who helped plan the January 6 pro-Trump rally that led to an insurrection, according to a bombshell report by Rolling Stone. The report cited two anonymous sources, one of whom was referred to as a “rally organizer” and the other as “a planner,” who claimed they participated in planning meetings involving members of Congress and White House staff ahead of the attack.
BAHAHAHAHA. AGAIN with the anonymous sources? Didn’t you dummies learn your lesson with the whole “Trump is a Putin agent” and the Steele dossier? You spent YEARS repeating an obvious falsehood then looked like complete fools when it all unraveled.
Of course, socialist dummies like Clayton Tucker will believe anything – which is why he runs around in a mask despite being vaccinated.
This isn’t the first time socialist bum Clayton Tucker (who is also the Chairman of Lampasas County Democrats) has made baseless and false accusations against Texas politicians. He was mad at Ted Cruz for the same reason and wanted everyone to sign a petition to get rid of him:
Unemployed maggot libels a sitting U.S. Senator by accusing him of engaging in insurrection
You make me laugh, Clayton Tucker, you socialist bum and Bernie Sanders lover. You remind me of a teenaged girl running for class president who tries to get everyone to sign a petition to make the cafeteria serve more pizza at lunch or something. LOL. Total loser.
Since we suddenly need to spend over $40,000 for yet another SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) computer system for the water/wastewater system, I did some research to find out just what the history of expenses are for this.
Here is what I found going back to 2013 (as far as I was able to search):
August 9th, 2013: City places an ad in the Dispatch asking for proposals and qualified bids for a new SCADA unit. Yes, they put this out for bid back then. The public post was again made in the Dispatch on August 13th, 2013.
Records are incomplete and sketchy – see page 105 as my proof. No numbers were given but “Phil Andreas, Public Works Director, explained that proposals were sent out for the installation of a SCADA system for the Electric Department and for an upgrade of the W/WW SCADA system. The proposal costs came in considerably higher than expected. City staff is asking that Council reject the W/WW bids received” [from page 14]
The closet thing to “W/WW SCADA” I can find is at the end of 2013 [page 67] – awarding a $18,252 contract to AWD for “lift station monitoring” and “SCADA additions”. They talk of integrating the equipment into the City’s “existing Wonderware SCADA system”.
July 14, 2017: Council unanimously approves the installation of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition equipment at the sewage lift station on FM 580 East, just past the Key Avenue intersection. The cost of labor, materials, programming and installation is $25,250 through Trac-N-Trol, the city’s SCADA system contractor. [see page 127 for invoice and explanation]
March 30, 2018: According to the Dispatch: “Council voted 6-0 to replace Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system equipment at four lift stations”
“In 2013, the city approved a bid for SCADA equipment that did not exactly matchthe existing SCADA system for the sewage treatment plant and the water system, Water/Wastewater Operations Manager Van Sims said. He said the two systems have not been communicating properly, and he said the only way to fix the problem is to ensure all units are the same brand. The council awarded the equipment replacement project to Trac-N-Trol for $15,900.”
According to the invoice [see page 151], they had to “remove existing Siemens PLC” and “install Allen Bradley PLC” instead. So, rip out all the old stuff that was previously bought and put in new stuff.
[Whoops! Sounds like a pretty big fuckup. Did anyone’s head roll for this? Did the contractor make things good for free? Did the City get any money back for the mistake? I’m guessing not]
August 2019: A mere 17 months after everything was now supposedly running smoothly thanks to $15,900 spent in March of 2018, a ransomware attack was allowed by Monica Wright’s IT Department which rendered the W/WW SCADA unit “inoperable”.
The City (Finley) informed us that the SCADA was “approaching end of life” anyways. Yes, you read that properly: the brand new SCADA that was just installed in April 2018 was now “end of life” in August of 2019.
Ok…if you say so, Finley.
The City then spent ANOTHER $15,990 in September of 2019 to install an ENTRIELY NEW SCADA under the premise that the previous one was “old” and only had Windows 7, when actually they needed Windows 10.
Fun fact: Windows 10 was released way back in 2015 – THREE YEARS before the March 2018 SCADA installation. So it begs the question: why didn’t the idiots at TraC-n-trol install a Windows-10-supported SCADA system in March 2018??
October 2021: Barely two years after the City paid $15,990 (a second time) to upgrade everything to Windows 10-supported SCADA, they are back asking for $40,530 for a new system. This is now supposedly an “upgrade” for an entirely new system.
How long will this one last before disaster strikes?
Don’t get me wrong – water treatment is right up there with law enforcement as an important and necessary function of local government. I’d rather they spend a million dollars on a proper water treatment system than spend $1 on stupid shit like a “business” park or water tanks for a community garden that already has water.
But heads should have rolled big time back in 2019 when a BRAND NEW SYSTEM was wrecked by a ransomware attack. Instead, Finley and Talbert brushed it under the rug as a Windows 10 upgrade and then THANKED the IT Department for their hard work!!!
One of the items on tonight’s agenda is the request for $40,530 to purchase a SCADA for the wastewater plant [page 3, Item 7.6 and also page 207].
This would all be fine and dandy except for one thing. Almost exactly two years ago, the City ALREADY bought a brand new SCADA for $16,000 after the old one was wrecked due to our IT Department allowing ransomware to run amok on the City’s servers.
Back then, here is how they justified the expense of $16,000 for a new control unit for the water/wastewater plant. This is lifted DIRECTLY from the City council packets [page 131]:
“The current SCADA computer was compromised in the recent ransomware incident and is not operational. While the computer was not planned for replacement in the current fiscal year, staff has been informed that due to the age of the device and the operating system (Windows 7) reaching end of life and no longer supported, it would be more cost effective to replace versus attempting to restore the existing device.
“The bulk of the costs of the replacement device result from a newer version of the SCADA software, which is required due to the update in the operating system to Windows 10“
So, they basically made it sound like Monica Wright’s IT Department fuckup was no big deal – because they needed to switch to Windows 10 anyways, right? They pretty much fobbed the whole thing off on Windows 10.
That was a mere two years ago. Here is a screenshot of the invoice for the August 2019 replacement from Trac-N-Trol:
Wow! A three-year warranty and tech support for the life of the system! And the much-ballyhooed upgrade to Windows 10. All for $16,000.
OK, we all know that this was a convenient excuse to cover for the IT Department fuckup, but whatever. The water/wastewater plant is pretty important and it was “only” $16,000. It should last a long time, right?
Wrong.
Tonight, the City will request yet ANOTHER SCADA unit! From tonight’s packet [page 207]:
“Trac-n-Trol will provide (for $40,530) the water department with a Windows 10 operating system, burn in and setup including all Microsoft updates,”...blah, blah, blah.
Whoah – sounds like they are using the “Windows 10” bullshit AGAIN. Sorry, but you ALREADY did all that a mere 25 months ago! Not to mention, the price now is more that DOUBLE what it was then! Hell, the invoices even look IDENTICAL!! Here is the screenshot for THIS YEAR’S SCADA:
They are virtually IDENTICAL! WTF? I don’t see any explanation in the packet as to WHY yet ANOTHER SCADA is needed just 24 months after the last one was installed (at less than half the price, I might add).
The hard drive for the NEW one is 512GB while the old one is a terabyte!
So…..the questions are (1) why in hell do we need a new one already and (2) why does the exact same thing cost over $40,000 when it was $16,000 two years ago?
Hell, the one from August 2019 is STILL UNDER WARRANTY!!!!
