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Delana Toups Three Year Anniversary Of Being Wrong About Business Park

Three years ago today, then-candidate for City council Delana Toups made the following horribly inaccurate statement to The Lampasas Dispatch hoping to justify the millions wasted on this ~~corpse repository~~ ‘business park’ which still sits as an empty weed patch today:

“Ms. Toups said she wants to continue to provide infrastructure to develop the business park — which she said [her opponent ‘Greasy’ Chris] Harrison spoke against publicly. Ms. Toups said through the Lampasas Economic Development Corp.’s hard work, “we are on the verge of seeing large corporations come in [to the business park].” – April 21, 2017

On the ‘verge’? As in Detroit Lions are on the ‘verge’ of winning the Superbowl? Or I am on the ‘verge’ of having ripped, six-pack abs and becoming fluent in Icelandic? That kind of ‘verge’?

I’m not sure that phrase means what she thinks it means. Here is the definition.

My only question: since you were all so wrong about this 3-5 years ago, what makes you think continuing to spend millions will ever be correct? I’m willing to bet another three years will pass and we will STILL be ‘on the verge’ of large corporations entering the ‘business park’.

City Council Special Session Tonight at 5:30pm – ** Updated As We Go!!

I’ll be live updating again. Can’t wait to hear all the details of Mandy’s ‘free LEDC money’ proposal!

5:35pm – Council being fashionably late. A whopping 14 people are waiting on-line to watch. About the same as last live-stream. Good thing you built that $1.5 million vanity project to hold 100 citizens. LOL. Can’t even get more than 14 to watch the easy way. SAD!

Video cuts in at 5:35pm, looks like meeting was already underway – nice job guys! Finley in the middle of a dissertation.

5:40pm – down to 12 people watching on-line. A citizen has called in. Can’t hear shit through the $96,000 A/V system, however. No idea what he’s rambling about. Mike White says they will probably have to pull from reserves this year to balance the budget. I’d say that’s most definitely true.

5:47pm – I will say, it IS nice to hear council argue over a proposal instead of rubber stamping something 7-0, as they usually do. Misti making her case that SHE (and council) shut down the businesses and therefor SHE (and council) have to pay something back. I don’t entirely disagree with that logic, except you should have let things open back up already. Two weeks is one thing. Two months is another. Let the damn businesses OPEN BACK UP, as I’ve argued before.

I love watching Randy Clark frustrate the rest of City council with his million questions. Just saying. He’s probably a nice guy but seems like he doesn’t know where he is most of the time.

5:52pm – this is devolving into quite a mess. Bottom line is you will NEVER make an electric utility payout plan that will make everyone happy. Somebody (probably many somebodies) will get hosed badly. It’s a no-win situation. Holy shit! There are 16 people watching! I’m guessing half are readers here at Lampasshole.com

5:54pm – TJ Monroe is yammering now. She still hasn’t learned how to talk into her $250 microphone, so it is all unintelligible. No great loss – she’s usually wrong on every issue. Up to 18 people watching this circus! Oops – there’s the 7-0 rubber stamp – a unanimous vote to implement some kind of two-tiered utility relief thingy. No idea what the wording is.

6:00pm – discussing waiving credit card fees for people paying their utilities. Very stupid idea. People can still pay other ways – the City incurs the cost from the credit card companies and those will not be waived. City will eat roughly $5,600 a month if they waive these fees. Council getting carried away with the giving spirit (*cough Kuehne cough*). Easy to do when they money isn’t yours! We’re at 22 people watching. Holy shit. Delana Toups arguing the correct side of the CC fee waiver. Hell hath frozen over.

Randy Clark back muddying the water with circular questions once again! BAHAHAHAHAHA. I’d go nuts if I had to sit on council with this guy. You guys REALLY need to turn on comments on YouTube. I think you’d get WAY more people if we could make jokes about all this shit in real-time.

6:07pm – I can’t believe they are wasting this much time on waiving CC fees. They should NOT be waived. If only they spent this much time worrying about $96,000 no-bid A/V systems and $180,000 no-bid bathrooms. CC fee waiver is voted upon…goes down 3-4 as it should. TJ Monroe on the wrong side of that too. Shocker. Kuehne and Randy Clark join her on wrong side…but to be fair, I’m not sure Randy knows what planet he is on.

6:10pm – discussing re-opening the golf course. DO IT!!! Jesus. Van Berry (golf course head honcho) arguing his case. Van and Ricky Roy (from my impression in the minutes over the years) are two of the few City employees with their heads NOT buried in their ass. Love to see a Berry/Roy ticket running for City Mayor and VP for life. Hell yeah. Van has clearly put a ton of thought into this – already figured out the flags, the rakes and water fountains. You City council bozos need to put Van Berry in charge of the entire City.

Aahhhhh shit. Randy Clark in there asking silly questions again. I think I’m going to call him “The Speed Bump” because he completely slows down every discussion.

6:15pm – golf course will reopen (unanimous vote). YAY! Now Finley is talking about telephone poles. Excuse me while I refill my vodka and take a shit. This might be a while. Twenty people watching online.

6:20pm – Holy Christ. Misti discussing changing her “closed forever” order when it comes to the Chinese virus. She is making a TON of sense. She even said “personal responsibility” when it comes to protecting your own health. Good for her. Perhaps I’ve been to hard on her. She is running this meeting like a boss. Finley is falling in line too. Wow. I am fairly shocked. Great job guys!!!!

My YouTube feed has frozen up. Pretty sure Mandy Walsh is supposed to make her case for the $3,000 handouts from the LEDC. Still waiting….

UPDATE Tuesday morning- well, it appears Mandy and her LEDC proposal were jammed into that first couple minutes of the meeting that did not get shown on live-stream. It is on the audio version, which can be found HERE. I’ll cover this in a later post.

Little Guy Screwed – As Usual

Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurants:

$42.2 million in profits last year

Spent $5.2 million buying its own stock

Pays its CEO $6.1 million per year

It has $86 million in cash reserves

It just received $20 million in taxpayer money from a fund meant to keep “small businesses” afloat.

LEDC Operating In Complete Secrecy

Where to start with the utter lack of transparency on the part of the Lampasas Economic Dunces Club? Let’s look at their track record so far this year. Remember, this is a group that handles HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars annually and has wasted millions on a ‘business park’ boondoggle that has gone nowhere.

LEDC is supposed to meet once a month – on the third Wednesday. Meetings are supposed to be open to the public and minutes are supposed to be TAKEN AND POSTED so the taxpayers (the ones FINANCING these idiots) have a clue what is going on. Here is a list of the minutes for far for the year 2020:

Impressive! Here we are on April 19th – and FOUR meetings should be archived. Instead we have ONE from three months ago. How did this happen?

The February meeting DID take place, but apparently the minutes are off limits. I specifically asked the City secretary for a copy of those minutes and was told “the minutes of the February 19 [meeting] were not on the agenda, so the minutes were not considered and the reason they are not on the website“

So the minutes for the FEBRUARY 19th MEETING will not be posted until May 20th. Lovely.

They didn’t bother having a meeting in March. That is also typical. They usually skip one meeting a year, at the very least.

The April 15th meeting was (as always) held in the $1.5 million Jack Calvert Fishbowl Vanity Project. That is the SAME place City council holds their meetings and live-streams to the citizens. It was not open to the public, but the LEDC couldn’t be bothered to use the $96,000 A/V system there to stream or at LEAST record audio like City council does. Instead, these dummies decided the citizens would have to go through the arduous process of registering to view the meeting on Zoom – a very well-known piece of junk that only a dunce would sign up for.

Incredible: the City ALREADY PAID FOR a $96,000 A/V system to record audio and video of meetings….but the LEDC can’t be bothered with that. Instead they want the taxpayers to dick around with a third-party, piece of crap teleconferencing site. There is absolutely no reason for this. I asked Finley two months ago during our face-to-face why the LEDC doesn’t use the $96,000 A/V system that is sitting right there in the meeting room. He had no answer. He didn’t know.

I was also told point-blank by the City secretary that “there is no recording” of the April meeting. Lovely again! I sure hope somebody at least took some minutes. Otherwise, they might be in violation of their charter.

So, we have ZERO idea what is going on with the LEDC as they prepare to hand out $3,000 checks to random businesses in town to “help them out” of the Chinese virus mess [page 3 agenda].

Luckily, LEDC will be having a meeting with City council on Monday the 20th (tomorrow) and that WILL be live-streamed and recorded. Nice of somebody to let the taxpayers know what is going on. But if you ask me, having Mandy Walsh and other City employees and bureaucrats in charge of handing out tens of thousands of tax dollars to random businesses is a recipe for disaster.

Also: “The LEDC review committee is the sole and final authority in determining eligibility for funding.“[page 5] LOL. Gotta love it. I’m wondering if there will be PUBLIC RECORDS of WHO gets HOW MUCH money. There better damn well be, or this is just a random and arbitrary slush fund run by City bozos and bureaucrats.

I’m also wondering if handing out $3,000 checks to businesses of THEIR arbitrary choosing is even legal. They claim “authority of the EDC under Sec. 505.103, Texas Local Government Code” [page 5]. So, of course I went and looked that up. Here it is:

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

First of all, how is this ‘promotional purposes’? It’s a giveaway, plain and simple. Secondly, if I am not mistaken, the LEDC skims about $300,000 in sales tax revenue per year for their little slush fund – so that would mean a max payout of $30,000 for this little program….or ten whole businesses.

Wonder how they will pick those ten lucky recipients out of hundreds. Will people who were nice to Mandy get first dibs? Maybe someone on the LEDC has a brother-in-law and HE will get first dibs. Who knows. All the more reason to drop this idea and simply disband the entire silly LEDC and let people KEEP WHAT THEY EARN themselves instead of begging City bureaucrats for some crumbs back.

Explain To Me Why We Are Still on Lock-down??

I understood the first two weeks of lock-down…maybe three weeks. The experts needed REAL data (since the Chinese are known liars) on how bad things really were, they had to get their ducks in a row, they had to move resources around, solve personnel problems, etc. OK – fine. It was a two week vacation. People take them all the time.

But we are now five weeks into this – and the idiots in charge just extended it ANOTHER two weeks! WHY??? Look at the data for Texas versus everywhere else:

DEATHS PER MILLION POPULATION:

New York: 821
New Jersey: 396
Connecticut: 271
Louisiana: 248 (clearly due to a LOT of fat people)
United States total: 105
TEXAS: 14

We are in the top 10 when it comes to LOW death rates per capita – and we are a HUGE state. The states doing better than us are sparsely populated (Montana, Dakotas, Wyoming). HALF of the country’s problem is New York and New Jersey. Fine by me – I will lose zero sleep over a few thousand less New York assholes roaming the earth. I fail to see why that means TEXAS shoots themselves in the head economically. Just close THOSE states down and lock em up like “Escape From New York”. You all want to live together piled up like sardines? This is what can happen. You made your bed, now YOU lay it in…not me.

New York also screwed themselves by keeping the subways open while their moron socialist mayor told everyone it was fine to go to Chinatown and take public transportation. Screw em – they brought this on themselves. Not to mention they always love to brag about how tough they are. Fine. Go be tough on a ventilator, jerk weed.

But back to the great state of Texas. What happens in two weeks, besides more economic suicide??? You going to keep us ‘safe’ in our cages forever? Eventually, you have to let people decide THEIR OWN risk level. This thing is going to spread through the population eventually anyways – you need to start a slow burn and get people out there to develop herd immunity.

It is now apparent that morbidly obese people are at FAR higher risk. So people like Bruce Haywood can stay home and sponge off the government (just like BEFORE the virus) but let the rest of us out to live our lives, for Christ’s sake. Some of us will get sick. A few of us will die. I get it. That is the ‘cost’ side of the cost/benefit analysis.

People who are 80 years old should probably just stay sequestered until there is a vaccine. Or maybe they value their daily round of golf more highly and want to take their chances and die happy. That is THEIR choice. Not yours.

The predictions of death and ICU needs and ventilator needs were off by orders of magnitude – therefore, the draconian measures they implemented need to be adjusted downwards as well. People need to get out there and mingle – and yes, get sick – to at least spread this to the ‘herd’ so we can get past it. Governor Abbott and Mayor Talbert made a HUGE mistake extending this lock-down a further two weeks. That will become apparent going forward.

2017 Talbert Versus 2020 Talbert

Here is an interesting nugget I ran across from Jan 17, 2017 [page 11] regarding the last time City council renewed their trash hauling contract.

WAY back then (three whole years ago), the City of Lampasas used Waste Management for their trash hauling. That contract was due to expire in the spring of 2017. Here is what then-council-member Misti Talbert said about renewing the contract with Waste Management:

“City council is not unhappy with Waste Management but wants to see if it is possible to save money on trash collection”

Wow. Smart thinking, Misti. I would agree that it NEVER HURTS to look around for a better deal. Seems to be something City council rarely does with anything else (*cough Azbell cough*), but I wholeheartedly agree it is a smart thing to do with EVERYTHING.

So what happened in 2017? Finley and the gang looked at FIVE different companies and let them bid for the new contract (yes, there are FIVE companies out there!). According to 2017 Finley, this “is a highly competitive process” [1/20/17 front page news].

Oh goody! Competition! That is always good for getting the best price!

They determined that Waste Connections “had the highest score of the five companies that submitted proposals for trash service” [3/3/17 front page news].

They did all this work for a three-year contract…since that Waste Connections contract was to last until April 30, 2020 (two weeks from now). All well and good. Nice job, 2017 Misti and 2017 Finley!

Fast forward three years to 2020 Talbert and 2020 Finley. Waste Connections’ contract is now up for renewal and the new period will be for FIVE years. Do 2020 Talbert (now mayor) and 2020 Finley still have the same zeal for “seeing if it is possible to save money on trash collection”?

Nope. Finley now can’t be bothered with that stuff. He says his “recommendation for council to extend [the current Waste Connections] contract is because of the company’s good performance and the potential disruption of service if the city sought a different provider” [2/18/20 front page news]

Weird how nobody worried about “potential disruption of service” three years ago when they let five companies go at it to get the best price. So what changed?

Well, as I have already mentioned previously, three members of City council (Talbert, Toups, Kuehne) won a ~~bribe~~ prize back in 2019 in a karaoke contest hosted by…..you guessed it! Waste Connections! They took home a whopping $2,500 in Oct 2019 and before that, $5,000 in 2018.

In short, Waste Connections handed three members of City council thousands of dollars just months before those same council members would be making a decision on a new five year, $5.5 MILLION dollar contract

Sooooo….back THEN (2017) it was worth it to check around for a better price just for the hell of it. But NOW (2020), after winning a ~~bribe~~ prize from Waste Connections, you are perfectly happy NOT to bother looking around for a better price, despite the fact that there is a “highly competitive process” out there and despite the fact that THIS contract is for a much longer period (5 years versus 3).

Got it.

My how things change in 36 months.

Just to be clear, you can hardly call this a bribe…since ALL the money Waste Connections handed to City council (plus another $7,200 swiped from the HOT slush fund) was immediately wasted on some giant metal letters. They didn’t PERSONALLY see any gain from the money. HOWEVER, they were without a doubt in my mind, influenced and not intelligent enough to see it. Unwittingly duped, as it were.

Somebody Should Probably Let City Council Know…

More than 2,100 U.S. cities brace for budget shortfalls because of coronavirus, with many planning cuts and layoffs.

Highlights:

More than 2,100 U.S. cities are anticipating major budget shortfalls this year and many are planning to slash programs and cut staff in response, according to a new survey of local officials released Tuesday, illustrating the widespread financial havoc threatened by the Chinese virus pandemic.

“There’s no question that the Chinese virus pandemic has had, and will have, a major impact on cities of all sizes,” said Clarence Anthony, the executive director of the National League of Cities.

The NLC joined with the U.S. Conference of Mayors to conduct the early inquiry into the economic effects of the Chinese virus, finding that many local governments are bracing for sharp declines in tax revenue as businesses shutter, workers lose their jobs in record numbers and tourism grinds to a halt.

Somebody forward to Mike White – the 4/15/20 retail sales report:

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and predict that no matter what, Finley and City council won’t cut a dime from the budget and won’t lay off a single employee. They WILL, however, grease up their fist and tell the taxpayers to bend over.

TJ Monroe Five Year Anniversary Of Being Wrong About Business Park

Another jog down memory lane….five years ago today in the Lampasas Dispatch. As a reminder, the ~~corpse repository~~ ‘business park’ still sits there an empty weed patch and TJ STILL sits on City council making poor decisions:

“Mrs. Monroe noted the Lampasas Economic Development Corp. is working with the business park south of town on U.S. Highway 183, and she said she hopes the site will attract good employers to Lampasas. [Council member TJ Monroe] – April 14, 2015

It has, in fact, attracted ZERO employers…good OR bad. The bill for that boondoggle is in the millions of dollars. It still looks like a useless weed patch and is nowhere NEAR ready.

These are the same people that think their judgement is so sound, they can ‘help’ local businesses during the Chinese virus scare. Ummmm….ok, sure.

City Council Meeting Synopsis – Updated LIVE

First off, a huge congratulations to whoever finally got smart a few weeks ago and realized they could use YouTube as essentially free video storage for City council meetings. Took you a few months…but somebody (probably not an IT person) used their head. Funny that Azbell reps, Monica and Kristy didn’t see that right away.

I’m going to try and do this every council meeting, going forward, so you can get the REAL dope – not the fluffy Dispatch version.

The big event was council arguing over how to help local businesses affected by the Chinese virus closings. Sounded like ‘how to hand out free money’ but I’ll admit I missed the first 8 minutes of the meeting.

Takeaways

(1) Mike, Mike, Mike….how the hell can Mike White NOT know sales tax receipts to the City will drop severely going forward?? Mike, you are a business owner. Have your sales been higher or lower the last 33 days? I know that personally, I’ve bought virtually nothing over the last month except for groceries – which are not taxable. Gas sales (and PRICE) are WAY down. Furniture stores…automobile sales…etc….all of those have essentially ceased. Mike’s thinking that the shelves were bare in Walmart and HEB and thus will INCREASE taxes is erroneous – since groceries aren’t taxed.

Perhaps I’m wrong and missing something, but I fail to see how sales tax receipts won’t be at least 20% lower than normal during this time and lower going forward.

(2) I get VERY VERY scared when City council starts talking about ‘helping businesses’ with money/incentives/grants/whatever. We have more than a few council members who have ZERO experience running a business and have no idea what the hell they are talking about. Judging from the way they have squandered millions in the past, I can only assume they will muck this up royally.

(3) The Small Business Administration is ALREADY running programs. The Feds are ALREADY pissing away $2 trillion on ‘help’. The governments at the federal, state and local level ALREADY spend nearly ONE TRILLION DOLLARS per year on welfare – which is a safety net ALREADY in place. The idea that Mandy Walsh (who has never run a business) or Delana Toups (ditto) or Chuck Harrison (ditto) are going to reinvent this wheel is laughable.

(4) Finley is now telling us that “they don’t sit on their hands” and they are still working behind the scenes thinking up ways to spend more money (CIP committee).

(5) Misti now patting herself and council members on the back for….well, for showing up, I guess.

Wow. Meeting over. That was fast. Nary a word about how the City will deal with reduced tax receipts going forward.

I’ll finish with this simple economic truism that is apparently lost on most: the government does NOT create wealth. It merely transfers from one entity to another. That’s it. All while taking a 30% administrative skim. The best thing government can do (state, local or federal) is GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY.

The best thing a City government can do is provide law enforcement, a court system, clean and reasonably priced water and keep the streets in shape – and do it all as efficiently and cheaply as possible. That’s IT. All the rest is bullshit and wheel spinning.

We don’t need $1.5 million City council chambers. We don’t need multi-million dollar business parks. We don’t need $96,000 A/V systems. We don’t need $183,000 bathrooms. And we SURE as hell don’t need Mandy Walsh and Finley deGraffenreid ‘fixing’ the local economy by randomly handing out tax dollars as “help”. Seriously…just get out of the way and let the free market work – and maybe stop the overkill of shutting down the entire economy by decree.

National Debt Jumps $700 Billion In 13 Days

I remember when $700 billion was a bad YEAR of deficits. We just did it in 13 days. That’s 3.5% of GDP in less than two weeks. I’m sure all you supposed fiscal conservatives out there are screaming bloody murder, right?

Right.

It was bad when Obama did the trillion dollar deficit thing but it’s just fine when Trump makes it $2.2 trillion, ammi right??

The national debt has jumped $2.2 TRILLION in ONE YEAR (4/9/19 through 4/9/20)!! Another record.

I’m left to wonder why I’ve had to pay taxes all these years when we can apparently (1) run massive multi-trillion dollar deficits forever and (2) allow the un-elected and privately held Federal Reserve to print trillions of currency units supposedly without consequence.

When the inflation inevitably comes, every dummy in the country will blame “big business” for screwing them when the REAL reason is average American dummies who think they can get something for nothing and that currency debasement and wealth are the same thing.