After Blowing $95,000 On Opulent NO-BID A/V System, City Decides Not To Use Video At All

After THREE City council meetings in the new Fishbowl and ZERO video records of said meetings, I finally just asked the City outright: “Are you aware of any plans to EVER have video recordings of council meetings?  It was promised last year by [recently fired resigned Assistant City Manager] Gary Cox.”

The official response: At this present time, the City does not have any plans to video the Council meetings.  If and when the decision is made to video the Council meetings, the videos will be made available on the City’s website.

You seriously can’t make up stuff like this. It’s almost as good as the LEDC promising “shovel-ready” sites in the Business Park four years ago and still having a useless weed patch today.

Just a quick reminder that not only did Gary Cox specifically promise video archives of the meetings, but thousands and thousands of dollars were spent on cameras and other devices to allow video recording of meetings and (later) live streaming.

Some expenses:

The City bought TWO Lumens VC-B30U PTZ cameras with RS232 controllers – those were $920 EACH = $1840

The City also bought a Matrox Monarch HD video streaming and recording appliance for $1,227 (NewEgg sells this same device for $995)

That alone is $3,000 worth of bells and whistles that the IT Department can’t figure out how to use. I have to assume that is the case: either simple incompetence or laziness. Why else would the City blow thousands on cameras and video streaming and recording and then NOT use it???

Of course, tens of thousands are wasted all the time in the IT Department and hundreds of thousands are wasted by the City in general. Three grand is spit in the ocean when it comes to City waste. But it just shows for the umpteenth time how wasteful and incompetent some parts of the City really are.

You would never catch Rickie Roy pissing away money like this in the Public Works Department. Never.

TJ Monroe: AC-wise and A/V-foolish

Yes, the headline is my little play on “penny wise and pound foolish”, but when it comes to The Seven Goldfish, it’s truly more like “foolish all the time,” when it comes to spending money. Also, the headline should be titled “A-foolish” since there is no ‘V’ (video) to be seen with the new $95,000 no-bid audio/visual system screw job. But I digress….

Recently, a few of the goldfish had a minor squabble about a bid for a new air conditioning unit for the Hostess House. Three bids were received (all in the same $5000 to $6000 price range) but Mike White wanted to go with the most expensive. If you read the details [see below], his decision makes sense. The warranty was better and the bid was more detailed. This should have been one of those things City Council passes in 30 seconds, since the difference between bids was a measly $1,000. Given the difference in warranties, I would say that is fair compensation.

But TJ Monroe was having none of it. As you can see from the Dispatch article below, she chose THIS hill to inexplicably die on. I mean, seriously, she is worried over a few hundred bucks for an AC unit, but last year she was part of the Dream Team that waved through a $95,000 NO-BID audio/visual system without so much as a peep!

TJ was also sitting on Council earlier this year when Spinley deGraffenreid informed the Council he would be spending $185,000 on another no-bid project: an unneeded bathroom in Campbell Park!

So, to recap for the people on the short bus and in the IT Department:

(1) A few hundred bucks on an AC system: TJ Monroe squawks and wastes council time with picking nits.

(2) $95,000 no-bid a/v system that had PREVIOUSLY been bid and accepted for $34,000 (a difference of SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS): TJ Monroe is as quiet as a church mouse

(3) $185,000 no-bid bathroom for a project the Parks Department head pitched a couple years earlier for $105,000 (a difference of EIGHTY THOUSAND DOLLARS): TJ Monroe is as quiet as a fart in a flour sack.

It’s also hilarious that they put a $5,000 AC unit up for bid but NOT a $95,000 or $185,000 project. Talk about flying upside down with your head up your butt.

I’m not going to dump on Clark, because he wasn’t around last year when the Azbell debacle slipped through Council. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he would have likely raised a stink about it.

Here is the Dispatch article with all the details:

On another agenda item, the council voted to pay All Seasons Service Inc. to replace a 5-ton heating, ventilation and air-conditioning unit at the Hancock Springs Hostess House.

The city received quotes of $4,800 from TexAir HVAC Inc., $5,298 from Miller’s Service Co. and $5,850 from All Seasons Service Inc. Those are all Lampasas companies.

Councilman Mike White said he does not think the bids are comparable, as he said All Seasons’ quote is much more detailed than the others.

When Mayor Pro Tem TJ Monroe asked White what questions he wants resolved, White said he wants to be sure city officials are “comparing apples to apples,” particularly in regard to the electrical phase and Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio rating.

White also noted All Seasons’ warranty — listed on the quote sheet as 10 years for the compressor, two years for labor and seven years for parts, with online registration. TexAir’s quote listed a five-year parts warranty, and Miller’s bid does not contain warranty information.

White said the Hostess House has had extensive air-conditioning problems, and he alluded to multiple service calls in recent years.

“So there’s [about] a thousand dollars’ difference between the most expensive and the cheapest, and you’re of the opinion that the warranty itself is worth that extra thousand dollars?” Monroe asked White.

The councilman responded: “And the detailed professionalism of the estimate, yes.”

Councilman Randy Clark said he does not believe city officials asked the companies for particular specifications on the HVAC quotes.

White said he talked to Parks Department Director Chris Eicher and learned that representatives of all three contractors met with Eicher at the Hostess House about the work the city needs to have done.

“And I can’t vote for the lowest bid when it’s not comparing [to] any of the other bids,” White said.

Clark asked White if he “would live with” a motion to delay action and seek new bids.

White said he does not think it is the city’s responsibility to have the companies submit new, more detailed bids for the HVAC unit replacement. He said the companies have worked on jobs for the city before and “know full well what to do.”

A motion by Clark to award the HVAC unit replacement to TexAir failed for lack of a second.

White moved to award the job to All Seasons. That motion passed 5-1, with Clark opposed

Christmas Shopping Almost Upon Us! Tips On Wasting Large Amounts of Money – Lampasas Government Style!

You need a HUGE new TV, you say? We got ya covered! Now, you COULD buy a kick-ass 75”TV with HD 4k with ALL the bells and whistles for $953. But that isn’t Spinley and The Seven Goldfish style of shopping!

You want something smaller, MORE expensive and with worse resolution, don’t you? Of course you do! Check out this baby – only 70”and without 4k resolution – and it costs 60% more!! Curious how the picture looks? Just head on over to the new $1.5 million Fishbowl on City Council night and have a look! There are FOUR of them to gaze upon!

You’re getting there – but that STILL ain’t City-Government-level money wasting. You need to pay more….WAY more for that smaller TV set! Well, Azbell Electronics has got you covered. Chris Anelundi and the scumbags at Azbell can get you that TV for $2,148.95! And NO it doesn’t matter if you buy four of them – NO volume discount for you! Sucker!!

Just ignore those 10 microphones at $240 each…

Don’t worry if your Assistant City Manager wife/husband tells you that Azbell sells their crap at a “significant markup over other vendors” – you go and do it anyways!!! THAT’S how you piss away money, baby. Goldfish style.

First Time Was Funny….Now It’s Just Sad

City Council met on November 12th for the second time in their new $1.5 million-dollar Fishbowl. I’d like to tell you that they finally got the fancy $95,000 no-bid Azbell Electronics video recording/archiving/streaming system to work this time, as was promised by recently fired resigned ACM Gary Cox well over a year ago. But, alas, it is not to be. Again.

You can hear the $95,000-quality audio recording here: https://www.lampasas.org/Archive.aspx?AMID=212

What’s the over/under on how many weeks it takes Monica to bite the bullet and call Azbell back out to re-teach her how to operate the Ferrari of A/V Systems? Go ahead, Monica. The $1,000 they charge you for the service won’t show up in the monthly list of “checks written for over $4,000″….so I probably won’t see it.

Or will I?

After all, it’s only been about a year since the system was installed and you were trained on it…and another 2 weeks since the last Council meeting. How could I possibly expect a City IT employee of 14 years to get things figured out THAT fast?

I should probably just “sit here for a minute and realize it was very worth it” to shell out $95,000 for an audio recorder and $8,600 worth of 70″ TV screens. Very, very worth it.

RKJ Construction Kicks deGraffenreid In The Nuts One Last Time For Elevator

RKJ Construction – the company in charge of the overpriced elevator for the Old City Hall project – apparently kicked Finley in his nut sack one last time on their way out the door. Jamming the City for $128,400 on a project initially bid at $119,532.

A quick recap of the elevator debacle:

  • The City sends out the elevator contract for bids WAY back in November 2016. Austin elevator is the lowest bid at $96,605 but our idiot former City councilman “Greasy” Chris Harrison moves to go with RKJ Construction at $119,532 [page 6] to ‘keep it local’.
  • The next time the elevator is mentioned in the minutes, it has somehow morphed to $125,508 [Jan 2018]. I never saw an explanation for this.
  • The Old City Hall renovation is held up for MONTHS because of the elevator.
  • Old City Hall project FINALLY done in November/December 2019
  • RKJ bills City $128,400 for elevator – FAR MORE than originally agreed to.

You’d think RKJ Construction would give the City a small break on price after (1) getting their bid accepted despite it being $30,000 HIGHER than the lowest bid and (2) screwing up so badly and delaying their entire project for months on end. You would be wrong.

In a final act of humiliation for Spinley, the City was billed a grand total of $128,400 for the elevator. A full $8,800 (7.5%) OVER their initial accepted bid of $119,532.

What was even more odd was they broke it into TWO separate checks: LAST month, the City cut a check (#153218 page 41) for RKJ for exactly $100,000 for the elevator. I thought to myself “how nice! They actually gave them a huge break on the price for being so incompetent and holding up the project for months on end”.

WRONG!

THIS month, the city cut ANOTHER check (#153799 on page 51) to RKJ for the elevator in the amount of $28,400.

I realize that being ripped-off for $8,800 is very small potatoes compared to the hundreds of thousands the City wastes annually, but Christ Finley – grow some balls and demand a few concessions from the clowns who couldn’t even get the thing done on time in the first place! You are supposed to pay LESS for incompetent work….not MORE. Absolutely pathetic.

City Council Humor…And Crazy Math

Listening to the audio-only recording of the first City Council meeting in the new Fishbowl provided some laughs…even if I had to sit through 90 minutes of absolute agony to get there.

Link to audio: https://app.box.com/s/k7e9kao553yiyt4vgatpfhvx6igyk9gq

The humor (once again) concerns the horrible deal the City wants to make by moving the police department servers from in-house servers to cloud servers.

If you slide forward to the 1:29:25 mark, you will hear (barely – the audio is terrible – not worth $95,000) the explanation as to why the PD needs to make the move to cloud storage. We are told that “by OUTSOURCING our video to a cloud solution, it’s gonna eliminate some work that Monica and Kristy have to do to maintain, update and repair that server.” [1:31:10 mark]

Yes, we definitely don’t want to burden Monica and Kristy with “maintaining or repairing the servers!” That is only, like, their JOB and stuff. Christ, between TSM Consulting, Watchguard, Tyler Technologies and all the others we pay for IT work, the poor girls will have nothing to do but change printer cartridges and head out for an early lunch! Poor dears.

There’s that word OUTSOURCING again! Something I’ve been calling for all along. EVERY city I contacted that was close to our size in population OUTSOURCES their IT. So I’m all for outsourcing – but you ALSO have to get rid of our overpaid IT Department at the same time. Otherwise it makes no sense.

More ‘crazy math’ comes in when we are told they need about 9TB of storage which will cost $270 per month. Apparently storage cost is 3 cents per gigabyte per month – or 9,000 gigs times 3 cents = $270.

Which SOUNDS cheap. Until you go to NewEgg.com and see that you can BUY a 10TB drive for $200 – or 2 cents per gig.

I’m no computer expert and I’m sure that a PD video server and NewEgg external drives are not completely fungible (look it up, Monica) but my point is made: storage is CHEAP in the year 2019. We can BUY storage for TWO cents per gig and own it forever OR we can RENT storage for THREE cents per gig PER MONTH. That makes zero sense to me.

Zero sense, that is, unless the ultimate aim here is to relieve Kristy and Monica of the ‘burden’ of doing their jobs and securing data. Only then does it make a tiny bit of sense.

Another scary thing I noticed from this audio-only recording was how quickly The Seven Goldfish just unanimously vote for massive new expenditures on stuff like this after a 2-minute presentation. Zero research. Zero deep questions. No tabling it until next meeting so they can check on some claims or do some math or ask about other alternatives. Nope. Somebody asks for a big check, and the Goldfish throw tax dollars at it. Easy as that.

The same thing happened with our useless city recycling program. One dummy at a town hall meeting asked for it – and voila: we have a new $12,000 expenditure for something that does ZERO for the environment. It’s actually quite alarming how easily the Goldfish are duped into writing big checks.

No-Bid $95,000 A/V System Is Just An ‘A’ System….No ‘V’ To Be Seen

I remember back in the heady days of Big Dreams and Profligate Spending…when City council was trying to explain why we needed a ridiculous no-bid $95,000 audio/visual system for their new chambers, with all the bells and whistles.

Assistant City Manager Gary Cox was explaining to The Dispatch:

“The monitors [TV sets Azbell raped them on] in the secondary rooms can be set up to provide audio and video from the main chamber — which would allow people to watch meetings live from the additional rooms if the crowd is too large [HAHAHAHAHA] for all audience members to fit in the main council chamber.”

And also this…..

“Cox said an archive of meeting videos will be available to the public. He added that the City Council could decide to stream live video on the internet so people could follow the proceedings if they cannot attend a meeting in person”.

WOW! Archives AND live-streaming! TOTALLY worth getting bent over for almost $100,000!

So I asked the City yesterday if I could see the video recording of the very first meeting in The Fishbowl on October 28th…seeing as how we paid almost $100,000 for the privilege. Their answer?

There is no video recording!

In fairness, Monica probably forgot how to work the fancy gizmo since they were likely trained on it almost a year ago. They did, however, send me a link to the audio recording. I’m no sound technician, but I’m pretty sure you can record audio-only for a LOT less than $95,000.

Audio link: https://app.box.com/s/k7e9kao553yiyt4vgatpfhvx6igyk9gq

So we don’t have live streaming of video…we don’t even have an ARCHIVE of the video. So I guess Monica couldn’t figure out how to record video after having over 10 months to do so, and all those fancy cameras and video recording devices were for naught. Just another failed Big Dream that cost the taxpayers a small fortune. Well done!

It Sure Looks Like IT Department Incompetence Just Cost The City MORE Money

The latest issue of the Dispatch had another interesting nugget jammed into the end of an unrelated article yesterday. Apparently the police department will be using a cloud-based storage system from now on, instead of using their own servers, which they have been doing up til now. From MY reading of this deal, it makes ZERO financial sense. From the Dispatch article:

 “The council voted unanimously to purchase a cloud-based video storage system for the police department. The police department’s existing video storage server is starting to fail, Montgomery said. He added that if the city bought a new physical server instead of using the cloud-based system, the new server would last only about four years.

The cloud-based system will keep data secure, allow for backups and make video-related work more efficient, Montgomery and Information Technology Director Monica Wright said.

The initial cost of the cloud-based storage system is $7,000. In addition, the per-month storage cost – based on the amount of total data the police department stores now – will be about $270, Montgomery said. Recurring annual costs – including software updates and support — will be $10,620.”

A quick look at the math tells me this is an ATROCIOUS deal, financially. The only possible motivation I can think of for this is that the August 16th ransomware attack made them realize just how incompetent our IT Department is and they are now paying up BIGLY to take this out of Monica’s hands and give it to someone who IS competent. I can gather this by how Montgomery points out the benefits of ‘keeping data secure and having backups‘ – which implies we do NOT currently have those assurances under Monica.

Servers cost about $11,000 and are SUPPOSEDLY good for only four years (this is nonsense, but I’ll run with it). So we divide the $11,000 by 4 years and we get a cost of about $2,750 per year set aside for server purchases. That is the CURRENT arrangement – buy a new $10,725 server every four years.

The NEW (financially retarded) deal is this: the City immediately gets bent over for $7,000 as the ‘initial cost’ (for what??). THEN, the City pays $270 a month ($3,240 per year) for data storage. THEN the City gets bent over AGAIN for $10,620 in recurring costs for support EVERY YEAR!!

So we go from $2,750 per year in the current arrangement to $13,860 PER YEAR with the new arrangement! Oh, and toss in a $7,000 ‘initial cost’ on top of it all!! This ‘new arrangement’ will cost the City almost $120,000 over the next 10 years. THAT is yet another REAL cost of having an incompetent IT Department who cannot be trusted to keep data secure.

This most bizarre part of this decision? The City JUST SPENT $10,725 on a NEW PD SERVER earlier this year – Feb 26th, 2019!!! [page 37].

So if we JUST SPENT $10,725 on a new server, then how is it “starting to fail,” as we are told in the article? It’s brand new. And how does a server “start” to fail? It either works or it doesn’t, right?

No, here’s what I think REALLY happened – and this is my OPINION, not fact. It is the only explanation that makes sense to me:

  • PD purchased that server in Feb for $10,725 just like they have been doing all along.
  • The August 16th ransomware attack happens and the police servers get frozen out (we KNOW this happened).
  • I’m guessing the PD servers were either ruined like the water department servers and City hall servers, or had to be rebuilt/recovered at a huge cost of time and hassle.
  • Somebody with a brain realizes Monica should not be trusted with important stuff like the police servers. When Monica ruins City Hall equipment, it can be swept under the rug by a pliable City Manager…but if police servers get bungled, very bad things can happen. Like gigantic lawsuits.
  • The City is in a pickle because they LITERALLY just purchased a new server 8 months ago. They have to gin up this b.s. about the server ‘starting to fail’
  • The Seven Goldfish cannot be THAT bad at math. I just refuse to believe they are THAT incompetent. I presume they are tacitly making a trade and paying an extra $11,000 every year for eternity in exchange for keeping an incompetent IT staff away from the important stuff.

All of this begs the question YET AGAIN: why do we need these two IT clowns in the first place? Why not just outsource ALL of the IT stuff and chop the city payroll by about $200,000 per year? We already have TSM on the payroll for $20k to $30k per year for general ‘network support‘ ….we have Tyler Technologies on the payroll for $44,000 per year…and now WatchGuard will be in charge of the police department IT for at least another $14,000 per year.

If buying a new server every 4-5 years is such a BAD idea and putting stuff on the cloud is such a GOOD idea, then why have we been buying servers all these years? Why didn’t we make this move 12 years ago? Why NOW? I know my guess: a disastrous ransomware attack in August of this year woke up the City to how clueless our IT Department really is.