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Dear Finley: You Are FULL OF CRAP [Part Three]

Now, where were we? Oh yes. We need to find $30,000 in the budget so we can pay a wage that attracts workers in a free market, open the pool and thus save the sanity of parents all over town. Original Lampasshole to the rescue once again.

FIRST: your admission prices are WAY too low. Bringing kids to the pool is essentially a substitute for babysitting. Parents who have been locked in with young kids for the last two months will appreciate this fact. I see admission is $2.50 for the entire day! According to the budget [page 6] you make about $40,000 per year in admissions revenue. You need to double the admission to $5 immediately…and ONLY Lampasas residents are allowed in the pool. Period.

BAM. I just doubled your revenue to $80,000. Maybe a bit less as some cheapskates will cry that $5 is too much to keep junior busy for hours and hours. Screw them – that’s a very fair price. It costs money to run a pool, and as far as I can see, the City ALREADY runs a deficit each year on Hanna pool of approximately $80,000 every single season [expenses of $150k versus revenue of $66k] . So users are ALREADY getting a deal. Anybody cries? Tell them to pound sand and explain that without raising wages there will be no pool at all. If you can pay $7 for a freaking Mojo coffee every morning, you can pay $5 to wear your kids out at the pool for three hours, moron. Don’t like it? Feel free to keep them at home all day and lose your sanity. I suspect they will shut up real quick and hand over a finski.

ALSO – your season pass pricing is VERY poorly structured…and based on “family” instead of “persons”. Forget $125 for a “family” – every hillbilly family with eight members within a half-mile of that pool will be subsidized by everyone else. Eight people take up way more room in a pool than three, yet you charge the same price. Totally idiotic. It should be $70 per person per year. Period. Drop the “per family” nonsense. If anybody whines about it, see above argument about pounding sand.

Secondly, your group pricing sucks. You only charge $75 per hour for private parties of 25 people?? Nonsense. Double that too. BAM – you just went from $8,000 per year to $16,000 per year in “rentals/parties” [page 6] revenue.

I just found $48,000 for you dummies in about 5 minutes – which is WAY more than you need. Ya’ll paying attention?? There’s more….

Thirdly, I hear from friends that there are anywhere from 8 to 10 lifeguards working in the pool AT THE SAME TIME!! Assuming this is accurate, that is ridiculous. Reduce that number! If there is some retarded Texas law about how many lifeguards per gallon of pool water or something, then go to the bare minimum. Eight or ten lifeguards in a pool that size is RIDICULOUS and unneeded. I used to lifeguard in an Olympic-sized pool with ONE other guy. We each had a side and were posted in the middle of the pool. Between us, we could reach anywhere in the pool in under 10 seconds.

BAM – just saved you another $10,000 assuming you can cut the work force by 10%. Pay more, get a higher-quality worker and jettison the useless turds. Leaner and meaner.

So….I basically just pulled $58,000 out of my Lampasshole in a few minutes. If that doesn’t spin your head, I have some other ideas:

Reduce Mandy’s Walsh’s salary by $30,000. See if she sticks around for her Facebook Nerf job for a mere $71,000 in salary and benefits. My bet is she will.
Knock $3,000 off the salaries of the 10 highest paid City Hall employees. Don’t worry – they won’t leave either.
Take $30,000 from the LEDC. They skim over $300,000 PER YEAR from the tax payers with nothing to show for it but an empty ‘business park’ and a bunch of gay #LampasasRising posts. Mandy/City council had no trouble bending the rules and handing out $100,000 in FREE MONEY to over 50 businesses affected by the Wuhan Flu after about two minutes of discussion. They can cough up $30k for local kids to work the pool. Call it “economic development” of high school wages, ya dummy!

Hell, put the golf course guy Van Berry on this stuff. He’s the only one of you knuckleheads who has to deal with money coming IN as well as OUT. He runs a tight ship over there and understands getting fees to cover expenses. Then throw the guy a $5,000 bonus for fixing your mess.

Anything else you want to know? Go do it. Class is over.

Dear Finley: You Are FULL OF CRAP [Part Two]

When we last left off, we needed to solve this “lack of applicants problem” so we can open the pools this summer. How do we do that?

Immediately, we raise the offered wage to $10/hr, and we make a lot of noise about it. Then we wait and see what happens. While we wait, let’s think about how we will PAY for this increase in wages.

The latest budget shows $75,000 allocated for “seasonal salary” at Hanna pool [page 31]. If we raise wages roughly 40%, then that line item should rise roughly 40% – or about $30,000. Gee…where are we EVER going to find $30k in the $26 million City budget? I have lots of ways…but first, allow me to rip you clowns to shreds on your wasteful spending over just the last few years.

I would like to remind Finley and The Seven Goldfish of SOME of the many times the City has wasted WAY more than $30,000 in the blink of an eye:

The $96,000 A/V system for council chambers comes to mind. You had a bid from Broadcast Works for around $35,000. You instead went no-bid with Azbell and blew an extra $60,000 right there.

You also went with a $128,000 elevator (for City Hall remodel again!) when there was a $96,000 bid on the table from Austin Elevator. That’s ANOTHER $30,000.

You sold a building for $75k then bought it back for over $200k – City Hall building AGAIN. That’s over $125,000 squandered.

You incinerated almost $170,000 on a pre-fab BATHROOM in Campbell Park….yet another no-bid project that could have been done for half of that. That’s about $80,000 wasted.

Mike White managed to find about $72,000 instantly last month to provide “free” electricity to the businesses they forced closed due to Wuhan flu. Apparently there was just $72,000 laying around unused.

Rich developer Deorald Finney was handed “free” electrical hookups for this houses in Stone Valley a year or two ago – at a cost to the City of about $72,000 in lost fees.

S2M2 was handed $150,000 for THEIR housing development after FORMER CITY COUNCIL MEMBER “Greasy” Chris Harrison begged for it.

City council and the LEDC squandered $15,000 on three giant metal letters two months ago that will supposedly sit on a pedestal in the town square and attract throngs of tourists! Where is that thing, by the way??

Don’t even get me started on the MILLIONS wasted on the moronic “business park” – which I have covered here in great detail over the last 18 months.

Do you idiot hypocrites see a pattern here?? You waste HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS when it comes to buildings/toys for government workers and politicians. You hand out gobs of money to your rich developer buddies and former council members. You jump into NO-BID contracts all the time. YET, you can’t find $30k to pay a decent wage to LOCAL KIDS working at the pool!

Aren’t you dummies always crowing about “supporting the local community”? I know Mandy Walsh does it daily. I know council members like Delana Toups and Misti Talbert parrot that line all the time too. How about “supporting the local kids” and paying them a wage for lifeguarding that isn’t a complete insult?

You all make me sick with your hypocrisy, you absolute buffoons. Excuse me while I go puke. I’ll be back for PART THREE and how we pay for this paltry $30,000 in a $26 million dollar budget.

Dear Finley: You Are FULL OF CRAP! [Part One]

I forgot to mention in my City council meeting summary that one of the reasons they SUPPOSEDLY can’t open the pools this summer is that, gosh darn it, they just can’t find anyone to work there! Very few people are applying for the jobs!

So, I guess that’s it then! There was no discussion from City council on how to fix that. They just accept that line of manure and move on. Oh well.

I went and LOOKED at the job postings. Guess what? They are offering MINIMUM WAGE to lifeguards! You gotta be shitting me. Hey Finley – I was paid $9 an hour to lifeguard back in 1985. That’s about $25 in today’s dollars.

Ya think maybe offering dog shit wages to the local kids might have something to do with the lack of response? This is from the same guy who raised the “Economic Development Director” salary from around $42,000 to $71,000 a few years back EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD MULTIPLE PEOPLE APPLYING AND EAGER FOR THE JOB AT THE LOWER WAGE!! [This was during the Masonheimer years].

This has to be the most hypocritical bunch of stingy bastards on the planet. I don’t remember hearing ANY of this nonsense when it comes to “attracting the best” paper pushers and bureaucrats. They give every high-level, six-figure bureaucrat in City government raises constantly! “We need to offer attractive salaries or they will go somewhere else” – that’s the crap I hear from Finley every time I point out the ludicrous salaries of some paper pushers at City Hall (*cough* Monica Wright *cough*). There’s always plenty of money for raises for the $95,000 paper pusher. But not a cent for the lifeguards – you can suck on $7.25 an hour, chump!

Minimum wage for lifeguards! You really are a bunch of sorry morons, you know that? Maybe you should step out of your cushy, protected government Nerf jobs and go look at job listings around the area to get an idea of MARKET WAGES in the REAL WORLD. Kids can start at Whattaburger for more than that paltry wage, for crying out loud.

I’ll delve into the VERY EASY solution to your problem in the next post. It requires common sense and basic math skills. Yet another free service from The Original Lampasshole.

Council Meeting 5-11-20 – Recap

Wow – a long one and a doozy. I’ll summarize what I remember hearing yesterday on the recorded audio.

Parking commercial vehicles on residential streets. Apparently there are “ten to twenty” tractor trailers and semis being parked overnight all over town. This discussion lasted WAY longer than it should have. It comes down to the safety issue (fire trucks can’t get through) and an annoyance issue (noise complaints at 3am from the neighbors). They talked about permits, but that seems like nonsense to me. So it’s ok to annoy everyone around you as long as the City gets their $200 permit fee? Fuggetaboutit.

There has to be a free-market solution in there somewhere. Talk to Wal-Mart or Stripes about parking there for a fee. One thing there is PLENTY of around here is open space. Hell, maybe talk to the LEDC! They have 165 acres of “shovel-ready business park” sitting there unused. I also see a TON of open space in the parking lots of all the schools that are sitting there unused. Have ’em park there and charge the truck owners $200 a month or something. Mike White was on the correct side of this argument. Should have been over in 10 minutes.

2. Mandy Walsh took credit for handing out free money (‘grants’) from the LEDC to around 50 lucky businesses. To hear her tell it, these business owners wept with joy and hugged her and she was their salvation since they didn’t know if they could open back up again until Mandy’s $1,500 saved them! [Yes, it sounds ridiculous to me, too]. Ten minutes ago, I officially requested a list from the LEDC of all businesses that received grant money (along with the amount given). Not that I don’t trust you, Mandy, but since it IS tax dollars being handed out, we need to make sure there was no cronyism and waste...which seem to abound when it comes to other LEDC projects.

3. The City is discussing NOT opening the public swimming pools for the summer. That is an outrage. This “social distancing” bullshit is like a religion all of a sudden, despite the fact that it is snake oil and not science (kinda like the plastic straw bans). You CANNOT social distance in a pool. Kids need to be kids. They need to roughhouse, pick boogers, dunk each other underwater, wrassle, and BE KIDS. Mike White was AGAIN the voice of reason on this issue, while the Speed Bump (Randy Clark) was for keeping them closed. Mike White said “it is not our job to enforce social distancing…everyone on the planet knows about Wuhan Flu now and they can make their own decisions. We have already taken so much away from these kids with the lock downs“. I am totally paraphrasing Mike there, but when he said it I was cheering in my car and yelling “f*ck yes, Mike!!!”. [I again reiterate that Mike White resigning from council is a huge blow. He is oftentimes the ONLY voice of reason and logic].

This “shut down the pools” is just another step in the pussification of America. If you are too much of a scared rabbit to go to the pool, then don’t go. Kids ESPECIALLY are at very low risk of dying from the Wuhan Flu. Let the parents make the decision to go or not to go. Christ, it’s just like the ridiculous peanut allergy nonsense where peanuts are banned from a school of 500 kids because one kid can’t handle peanuts.

The Wuhan Flu is going to be with us a LONG time – probably forever. And yes, some people are going to die from it. Get used to that. It is very unlikely there will be a vaccine any time soon. Quite frankly, I’d rather get out there and spread it around and get it over with. If you are morbidly obese or over 65 you may want to be a lot more careful, but for the rest of humanity, let’s get on with it already.

I’ll be VERY keen to see what happens with schools in the fall. I’ll tell you this: if you don’t re-open the schools you are going to have a LOT of VERY pissed-off parents. We all pay a LOT of taxes to run these schools and having the kids “learning by Internet” is not going to cut it. Parents are not going to shell out THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS in property taxes and then have their kids underfoot all day long screwing around on the Internet. No way. There will be pitchforks and torches.

So, since you know you are going to open the schools in the fall or face riots, you may as well start now and open the pools and let these kids mingle and spread all their germs around. You DO realize that’s how immune systems work, right?? They need germs to practice on, to quote George Carlin.

ODDS AND ENDS: Also in the meeting, we learned that March sales tax receipts were UP 11%, which blows me away. We were basically shut down the last 12 days of March, so to see sales tax UP 11% was a real shocker. So I guess Mike White is correct so far and it is Mike – 1 and Lampasshole – 0 on those predictions. I guess we will know more in one month when the April sales tax numbers come out. I have to assume a massive drop-off then. We shall see.

I leave you with the great George Carlin and his germ lessons from NINE YEARS AGO but absolutely accurate today – LOTS of bad words in here!!! The two-minute mark onward is especially relevant today:

Council Meeting 5-12-20

Missed it last night. Some things are more important…like a killdeer hatch. Will listen and comment later.

LEDC Director Job Description

Although Mandy Walsh is already currently holding the title of LEDC Director, if she ever left (why would she??) and they needed a new person, I have provided a job description for you:

LEDC Director position available! Salary and benefits of over ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR! Yes, we know the average wage in Lampasas is about 65% LESS than that, but this is an IMPORTANT JOB!

Must be able to: create stupid hashtag pages like #lampasasrising which actually do nothing at all but make you THINK you are actually doing something. Must be able to take credit for every single business that opens in Lampasas, even though they would have opened with or without your existence. Must ALSO be able to IGNORE every business that closes (Cafe 281, Rutlands, Toupsie’s, Mamma Jeans, Chinese Buffet place, that chocolate/bookstore place that came and went, etc, etc, etc) and pretend that never happened.

Must be able to also hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars of other people’s money and then bask in the credit. Must also attend quasi-retarded conventions several times a year (we pay thousands of $$ for your food and lodging, though!) and be conversant in useless buzzwords like “identifying community assets” and “encourage collaboration”!

Sound like an easy and overpaid job? What’s the catch? There isn’t one!! This is a typical government make-work job! Apply now!

**UPDATED**

Today’s Dispatch has a blurb about our Economic Developer completing some course at the Texas Community Development Institute (CDI). I had zero comprehension of how far you could take this “Community Development” scam! Not only are there scammers in every small local government milking the taxpayer to “develop their economy” but there is an actual INSTITUTE giving out credentials for this horseshit! I view this is about as meaningful as a masters in “Gender Studies” or “Art History” or “Sociology” – a totally bogus and useless circle jerk propagated by a group of navel gazers.

Just take a look at the absolute gibberish they printed in the Dispatch [5/12/20 page 6]:

The PCED exam content
is based on comprehensive,
current and applicable
information for community
and economic development
practitioners with questions
to measure both the
understanding of content
and the ability to apply the
appropriate methods and
tools to specific community
situations.

When you read nonsensical bullshit like that, your antennae should go up and scream “useless scam alert!”. Something tells me the City probably paid for her to ‘earn’ this particular pile of horse manure as well. They never stop burning money at the LEDC!

116,000 Americans Died In a Pandemic.

The year was 1957.

Elvis’s new movie “Jailhouse Rock” was packing the theaters. The last episode of “I Love Lucy” aired on television. The show “West Side Story” held tryouts in Washington, D.C., and opened on Broadway in September. Ford’s new car the Edsel rolled off the assembly line. The Cold War with Russia was on and “In God We Trust” appeared on U.S. currency. The first Toys R Us store opened.

Also that year, the so-called Asian Flu killed 116,000 Americans. Here is the full summary from the Centers for Disease Control:

In February 1957, a new influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic (“Asian Flu”). This H2N2 virus was comprised of three different genes from an H2N2 virus that originated from an avian influenza A virus, including the H2 hemagglutinin and the N2 neuraminidase genes. It was first reported in Singapore in February 1957, Hong Kong in April 1957, and in coastal cities in the United States in summer 1957. The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.

Like the current pandemic, there was a demographic pattern to the deaths. It hit the elderly population with heart and lung disease. In a frightening twist, the virus could also be fatal for pregnant women. The infection rate was probably even higher than the Spanish flu of 1918 (675,000 Americans died from this), but this lowered the overall case fatality rate to 0.67%. A vaccine became available in late 1957 but was not widely distributed.

The population of the U.S. at the time was 172 million, which is a little more than half of the current population. Life expectancy was 69 as versus 78 today. Even with shorter lives, it was a healthier population with lower rates of obesity. To extrapolate the data to a counterfactual, we can conclude that this virus was more wicked than COVID-19 thus far.

What’s remarkable when we look back at this year, nothing was shut down. Restaurants, schools, theaters, sporting events, travel – everything continued without interruption. Without a 24-hour news cycle with thousands of news agencies and a billion websites hungry for traffic, mostly people paid no attention other than to keep basic hygiene. It was covered in the press as a medical problem. The notion that there was a political solution never occurred to anyone.

Again, this was a very serious flu, and it persisted for 10 years until it mutated to become the Hong Kong flu of 1968. The New York Times had some but not much coverage.

The mystery of why today vast numbers of governments around the world (but not all) have crushed economies, locked people under house arrest, wrecked business, spread despair, disregarded basic freedoms and rights will require years if not decades to sort out.

Is it the news cycle that is creating mass hysteria? Political ambition and arrogance? A decline in philosophical regard for freedom as the best system for dealing with crises? Most likely, the ultimate answer will look roughly like what historians say about the Great War (WWI): it was a perfect storm that created a calamity that no one intended at the outset.

For staying calm and treating the terrible Asian flu of 1957 as a medical problem to address with medical intelligence, rather than as an excuse to unleash Medieval-style brutality, this first postwar generation deserves our respect and admiration.

LEDC Grant Numbers Don’t Add Up. Is Grant Program Even Legal??

As usual with the LEDC, the rules, regulations, mission statements and math never seem to add up.

Recently, Mandy Walsh told us that the LEDC would be giving out “grants” (free money) to local businesses who were closed down because of the Wuhan virus. She claims they are able to do this by “authority of the EDC under Sec. 505.103, Texas Local Government Code” [page 5].

Great. So if you go LOOK UP Section 505.103 in the Texas Local Government Code, you get this:

“A Type B corporation may spend not more than 10 percent of the corporate revenues for promotional purposes.”

That is literally all it says. OK – fine.

Unfortunately, Mandy has said this program will hand out $100,000 in free money, presumably for “promotional purposes” since that is what Sec 505.103 says. The LEDC “corporate revenues” (sales taxes they skim from the citizens) are roughly $300,000 (according to their last available Form 990 Part VIII Section 12 = $309,746)

By my math, 10% of $309,746 is $30,974 NOT $100,000.

So, what say you Jo-Christy Brown?? Is this legal or what?? Sure doesn’t look like it. But I’m not a high-priced City attorney either….just a tax cow to be milked.

Let’s Talk About Public School Salaries

Since the school system is effectively shut down since mid-March and (as far as I have heard) everybody in the public school system is still getting a full paycheck, let’s take a look at some of the salaries, shall we? I’m inspired to do this because I saw one teacher’s moron of a husband belly-ache on Facebook that his “poor teacher wife only makes $4 an hour” – which is a bald-faced lie. But we’ll get to that moron in a future post.

Some fun facts: there were 548 employees in the LISD (2018 data) for roughly 3,330 students….a ratio of ONE employee for every SIX kids. Wow.

Let’s start with the Big Wigs In Charge:

Douglas Chane Rascoe sits at the top of the heap – he is the superintendent of the entire LISD. His salary is listed at $148,500 for his nine-month year but that is from the 2018 data. He is currently making $158,751.84

[ALL this data is from 2018 – which is the latest year posted. However, ALL of these are now much higher thanks to recent raises. Also, don’t forget to add AT LEAST $10,000 for medical benefits (probably more like $14,000 if the City of Lampasas is any indication)]

Shane Michael Jones is listed as “Business Manager” and he pulled down $107,790 back in 2018.

A true bureaucracy is not complete without a bunch of assistants and associates and deputies. Kevin Matthew Bott fills those shoes as “Asst/Assoc/Deputy Superintend” at $97,990

There are five principals listed:

Lynn Robert White – $95,240
Kevin Dana Holcomb – $88,526
Jessye Renee Cummings – $79,950
Lee Wesley Graham – $75,890
Leslie Brook Talamantes – $74,740

There are EIGHT Assistant Principals listed:

Young Duane Faude – $71,497
Raymond Norris Otterson – $69,122
Lindsay Rebecca Duhon – $67,300
Corey Jason Harris – $65,355
Gail Lori Ramsey – $63,412
Michael Clinton Burns – $62,664
Keele Jami Lelaine – $60,751
Leon Dick Parker – $43,764

So, those top 16 employees pull down $1.272 MILLION annually right off the bat…before we count a single teacher. Of course, this salary data is old so we can tack on 5% immediately and get $1.336 million. We can add another $160,000 for medical benefits at the LEAST (I am being very conservative here) for those 16 people and get close to $1.5 million annually. I haven’t even counted all the retirement benefits yet.

Next on the list is Scott Troy Rogers – listed as Teacher and Athletic Director. For those titles he receives $90,740. More than any principal or assistant principal save for Lynn Robert White.

Then we have Wanda Marie Bunting…listed as “Business Services Professional”. No clue whatsoever what that job entails but it sure pays well: $79,040 to be exact…and summers off, don’t forget!! This woman is paid almost 13% ABOVE the average and lives in little old Lampassy – where the cost of living is quite low.

The highest-salaried person listed as TEACHER only (no other titles) was Brad Goen at a whopping $77,041. Wow. He must be an outstanding teacher! Just kidding. I don’t think that’s how it works in a government-run monopoly. He must just be an old guy who has been there forever, right?? Remember…these are 2018 numbers!

Next on the teacher salary list is Ruben Guerrero at $68,692. I tried to Google this guy and find out what he teaches. All I found was newspaper articles of him being a track coach or something. I assume he must teach SOMETHING for that kind of dough, but I’ll be damned if I know what.

Michael Richard Hooper is next on the list. A Google search tells me this guy was a BAND DIRECTOR! But it looks like he jumped ship for Port Aransas ISD last year. What an ingrate! Guy was pulling down almost $70,000 in Lampasas and he bails out.

Jim Burkes is next down the line with a $67,891 salary for his nine months of effort.

To be continued….