Some awesome lady in the peanut gallery stood up and let council know she was not happy with the electric rate hike. Herb Pearce (a new council member) was quick to jump in and blame it on the February freeze and said money needed to be raised:
Herb Pearce: “I think the City took a $1.5 million dollar hit this last year during the freeze…and didn’t raise it [rates] a bit? And they didn’t pass that along to the citizens? In order for us to be prudent in what we’re doing, this is what needs to happen.”
OK. Fair enough. Maybe that’s true. It’s hard to know WHAT is true anymore because back at the February 22nd meeting, then-mayor Talbert AND Finley told a very different story about the electricity situation. Herb Pearce was NOT on City council at the time, but many other Goldfish were – Monroe, Kuehne, Williamson and Clark.
It all starts at the 20 minute mark on the video. I’ll give you some highlight quotes below as they talk about the electric fund and money situation:
Talbert: “It’s important for the people watching at home to know: the position that we are in in terms of the utility rates we pay is accredited to one person and one person only – his name is Finley deGraffenreid….0ur risk has been mitigated by his ability to broker deals for us and secure us not knowing that something like this would happen, but in the event that it has we come out on top. When it comes to utility rates, that’s who you thank right there” [points to Finley]
Finley: “Our contracts are currently fixed-pricing…so the pricing from our wholesale suppliers per kilowatt will not change”
Finley: “We are financially healthy…our electric department does carry adequate reserves to overcome the temporary spike”, “I think this is a bump that we just absorb because we are healthy financially….the impact…is pretty negligible…but we are certainly in a position to absorb that if council so chooses”
Talbert: “I would like submit that the City absorb the cost instead of passing it on”
At the last City council meeting, Mandy tried to intimate [go to the 1:19:35 mark in the video] that the LEDC is a bargain for the City and how they hardly spend any money at all! In fact, she has a little story she tells to the kids at school:
“When I do this at career day at school, I like to use the iPad example, cause somehow that just resonates with all the children. Say you buy an iPad here in Lampasas for $574, you can see the breakdown there of what the EDC actually collects to use for economic development purposes – which is $1.43. So we have to be very wise…with our spending” [sarcasm and smirk here]
[Editor: Jesus H Christ – iPads cost almost $600?? Are you shitting me? Out here in the real world, those of us without a government Nerf job would get a Samsung or something for about $200 less. But when you work for Lampasas City government, you can afford to waste money on such frivolities, I guess. Mandy probably has two of them. But I digress…]
Awwww….she only costs you $1.43! Ho ho ho! We have to be very wise with that $1.43! Ho ho ho! Such a paltry amount! Such a pittance, really!
She’s such a card. She’s also pulling the wool over the eyes of those kids.
If I followed Mandy at “career day”, I’d have to make a few clarifications for the little nippers when I got up to stand at the front of the room. It might go something like this:
“Well kids, that $1.43 might not sound like a lot, but the reality is that it is more like 305,000 iPads we are talking about, which is the equivalent of every man, woman and child in the City buying FORTY overpriced Apple gadgets – since the LEDC skims $330,000 per year AND Ms. Walsh also costs the taxpayers about $107,000 in salary and benefits!”
“They then take most of that money and set it on fire in a big field on south highway 183. They call it the “business park” but really it is just a big money bonfire. You like bonfires, right kids??“
Furthermore, you don’t have to do any hard or icky work. No sweating or getting doody or poopy on your hands. No, you get to play on Facebook all day and hit “REPOST” on stuff that hard-working, risk-taking small businesses owners post! Cool, right? Like The Rolling Pin:
“And here is the VERY best part besides the massive salary and benefits and never getting fired and playing on Facebook a lot: there is NO WAY to judge her performance! That’s right! Every single business that comes to town…SHE CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR! Whataburger…Cefco…Burger King…Best Western. She can take credit for all of it! HAHAHAHAHA! There is no way to prove that they would have come here anyways!“
If I had a dollar for every time Mandy Walsh stood before council and lied, I’d have enough money to buy a pre-fab bathroom for Campbell Park!
As usual, the $6 million corpse repository ‘business’ park was the source of her fabrications.
If you go to the 1:21:10 mark of the latest City council video, you will hear her utter her usual nonsense:
“This is an effort to obviously increase our tax base here in Lampasas. So many businesses are looking to relocate…even local businesses looking to expand…this provides land for us to now use…ummm…for those businesses that are looking.“
Lies, lies and more lies.
First of all, the land has been there for 17 years and has been “shovel-ready” for almost 7 years now. Yet no takers! So your rubbish about “this provides us land to now use” is complete bullshit.
Local businesses looking to expand? I don’t think so. Name one. You ALREADY have a 5.6 acre “industrial park” sitting over there on 580 E that has been a vacant eyesore for YEARS. If you can’t fill a 5.6 acre “business park”, how are you going to fill the 165-acre one? You aren’t.
Also, we DID have a local business that was looking to expand a few years back. City council told them to fuck off. No, I’m not kidding. I already wrote about how the City told Anijimoto to take a hike five years ago when they wanted to expand and create 200 more jobs:
The LEDC has been skimming millions for 23 years and have nothing to show for it. They have wasted millions on the business park, and have nothing to show for it.
There are “so many businesses” looking to get into the park, but Mandy can’t name one. There are so many local businesses looking to expand, but she can’t name one. There is SO much demand for 5 acre plots from all the secret prospects, but simultaneously the 5.6 acre “industrial” park has sat empty for YEARS.
A REAL company in town offering hundreds of REAL jobs (not pie-in-the-sky bullshit 7 years from now) was told to go fuck themselves. The ONE “prospect” that Mandy and the LEDC wasted a YEAR “negotiating” with (Mike Cour and Eco-Strong) turned out to be a scam artist and scum bag who tried to scam them out of $1.85 million dollars for a tire recycling plant and the deal then promptly fell apart.
“Underwood said staff work more than 15-hour shifts every day, with some aiding in the transport of patients to nearby hospitals due to a shortage of beds. Doctors like Cain have even seen patients in their vehicles outside the clinic.“
The implication here is that the clinic is SO full and overflowing with those terrible unvaccinated hillbillies, that there is just no room in the clinic!
This is another bald-faced lie by that dumb bastard James Cain. As luck would have it, just last week my girlfriend AND her 6yo girl went to this very clinic. They had symptoms for strep throat and needed to be tested.
Lo and behold, since the little girl had a fever, they were told to wait outside in the car!
So the reason there are so many people sitting in their cars outside, is that you IDIOTS are MAKING THEM SIT IN THEIR CARS. God forbid we let anyone inside a DOCTOR’S OFFICE with a fever! The medical profession has only been doing that for about 200 years up until March 2020.
[Turns out they BOTH had strep throat. Shocker!]
I mean, if someone has a fever, then it MUST be Covid, right? There are no other illnesses around anymore, I guess. I don’t know why FMC is so scared to let a little girl with a fever into the office, since presumably THEY are all vaccinated, right James Cain? Surely your own house is in order over there before you start demanding the entire world get the jab. So why not let sick people actually enter the fucking clinic? Not to mention, you make EVERYONE wear a mask as well!
Nah – makes too much sense.
Speaking of moronic policies, Cain talks about that too:
“I’ve seen more of this than I’ve ever seen in my community, and I’m tired. We’re all tired,” Cain said. “I would say not just in a medical establishment but in all establishments, there’s a healthcare shortage across the board, as it is in every industry right now. So, when you’re pulling up to the front desk [at the hospital] … just be thankful that guy came in to work that day. Because that person is working more hours than they ever had.”
There is a shortage, alright. But it’s not because of us unvaccinated rubes. It’s because moron hospital administrators are firing nurses all over the country who refuse to get the vaccine:
You know…those YOUNG and FEMALE nurses who worked ALL last year without a vaccine and many of whom ALREADY caught it and have natural immunity. These same nurses that see Covid up close and personal – so maybe they know a thing or two about who is REALLY dying from Covid (hint: super old, morbidly obese, and those with other problems like diabetes):
Covid not a danger to young, female and healthy
Perhaps the nurses are WELL AWARE that scumbag hospital administrators have called EVERYTHING Covid to grab that federal money and they know GOOD AND WELL that the Covid numbers are wildly inflated:
Perhaps these YOUNG and FEMALE nurses did a cost/benefit analysis in their heads and decided their chances of dying from Covid were miniscule and were not worth injecting a substance whose long-term effects are unknown?
Nah – dumb bastards like James Cain and hospital administrators all over the country (who are mostly old men, probably) don’t give a shit about the science – or the young women who busted their asses last year WITHOUT a vaccine. Guys like James Cain just say “jab em all and let God sort em out!”
Jesus what a shitty article. So much data left out. So many questions left unasked. No offense, Monique Brand, but you should do a little more digging in ALL of your articles.
First of all, James Cain has ZERO respect for naturally acquired immunity – he acts like it doesn’t exist. Perhaps he slept through that class in med school. How do I know this? Because I actually went to him a few months ago for a regular checkup and said I wanted to get tested for Covid antibodies. His response?
“What purpose would that serve?”
He literally said that.
I was shocked. Seriously? It serves the purpose of informing me if I have natural immunity and therefore don’t need the vaccine, you dumb bastard. I couldn’t believe my ears. I hadn’t been that stunned by a doctor’s stupidity since Morris Patteson (known abuser of pain pills) told me 8 years ago that two drinks a day would ruin my liver.
OK buddy.
Of course quacks like this only know one word: VACCINE.
You never hear any other words, like HCQ, vitamin D, zinc, Ivermectin, natural antibodies, lose some fucking weight, vitamin C, monoclonal antibodies, Remdesivir, get some exercise, etc. No, all you hear is “vaccine” and the implication that THAT will solve all our problems. Which is complete bullshit, of course:
I’m going to throw out some Dispatch article quotes in no particular order and then tear James Cain a new asshole – because a lot of what he says is straight-up bullshit. I’ll start with my favorite:
“People’s hesitancy to get the vaccination is real, and it’s understandable. And you know the thing that I’ve got the realization of since I’ve been through this since last year … is that people’s ability to really grasp all these details is difficult.”
Yes, it’s so difficult for us retarded, backwards swine to grasp all the details. Only smart doctors like James Cain can read and comprehend news and studies. Don’t bother believing your own eyes or what you see in your own family or social circle. No, we morons should just believe every word that guys like him tell us. He even says as much!
“Cain said he discusses the vaccine science to hesitant patients and stresses the need to “trust in their doctors.”
Both those doctors have a LOT more letters after their names than James Cain, so I guess we should listen to them even harder? Or something like that.
Hell, last July our local health authority was telling everyone in the Radiogram that wearing a bandana over your mouth was a good way to stop the spread. That doctor was 100% wrong also.
We have also seen doctors outright LIE over and over again. Remember THIS bitch??
Not to mention the CDC and pharmaceutical companies are lying and obfuscating the REAL number of vaccine deaths and issues by using an arbitrary “14 days after second shot” definition of vaccinated:
I’m sure the super smart James Cain knows that if you get a “vaccine” shot and die the next day, you are not counted as “vaccinated” and that death doesn’t “count” as a vaccine death. If you get the SECOND shot and die three days later, that doesn’t count either. The current definition of “vaccinated” means a full FOURTEEN DAYS after the SECOND shot!
Consequently, there are a hell of a lot of people in the hospital and morgue who had several “vaccine” shots in them but they aren’t counted. The brilliant El Gato Malo does his analysis below:
But we can’t listen to El Gato Malo, because he’s not a super smart doctor with letters after his name. He’s just a rube using math, common sense and real-world data, the fool.
It’s possible the vaccine is helpful for those older than 65 and those with huge underlying problems – like being 150 pounds overweight. Do a cost benefit analysis and make your own decisions. But make no mistake – there ARE costs to the vaccine (possible death, strokes, heart issues, becoming paralyzed, etc)
People under the age of 40 (especially females) who are otherwise healthy probably DON’T need a vaccine and taking one may actually WORSEN THE SPREAD!
Healthy people who have ALREADY HAD Covid also don’t need a vaccine. But you’d never know it if you go see James Cain! He doesn’t even comprehend why you might want to know if you have Covid antibodies!!
There are few things funnier to me than a moron trying to look like a genius. Kinda like local lemonade stand hobbyist Julie Landrum yapping about quantum physics:
The cray cray is strong with this one!
Except maybe a chimp riding a Segway…..that’s funnier:
Speaking of primates looking ridiculous…..
Cathy Kuehne tried hard to look smart at the last council meeting. Unfortunately, she only succeeded in looking like a smug ass-hat, in my humble opinion. Thank god this public school teacher doesn’t teach any real subjects like math or science, because she is a dyed-in-the-wool moron.
A copy of the legislation is HERE and another copy can be found in the City council meeting packet HERE [page 91].
In essence, it is giving MORE paid time off to cops and firefighters for “Covid”.
This is ridiculous for several reasons:
City employees ALREADY get plenty of time off. I’ve covered this HERE. Sick leave accrues at a rate of 3.69 hours per bi-weekly pay period. That translates into 12 days per year. They ALSO get ‘free’ health insurance from the City.
It shouldn’t matter if you get sick with a head cold, the flu, pneumonia, a bad appendix, or Covid. It’s ALL the same in that you are missing work. Besides, haven’t you heard that the flu has been eliminated? So nobody needs time off for THAT anymore:
There is NO WAY IN HELL you can pin down where a cop or firefighter or anybody else actually contracted Covid, so don’t come at me with that horseshit. Most studies show it is transmitted in the home.
But Kuehne has never been one to traffic in logic or common sense. I doubt she reads any studies and statistics. After all, she is a liberal who teaches finger painting.
SHE thinks that: “if we are asking firefighters and police to put themselves in harm’s way…and if they contract Covid…on the job…they deserve for the City to take care of them….without taking family medical leave….because that is not FAMILY medical leave, because it happened WHILE DOING THEIR JOB” [emphasis mine because she sounded so incredibly condescending here that I wanted to strangle her]
First of all, Porkchop – the City ALREADY “TAKES CARE OF THEM”. They get free insurance through the City AND they accrue sick leave at the aforementioned rate, which comes out to 12 sick days per year. That is in ADDITION to a lot of vacation time:
Secondly – it is IMPOSSIBLE for you or anyone else to know exactly where a police officer or firefighter or anyone else caught Covid. If you think otherwise, you are a moron.
Porkchop then said that “I think other businesses should do the same thing” [offer a bunch of extra “free” time off for Covid]
Of course you do! Because you have never owned or run a business in your life! You are a liberal who thinks money grows on trees! You have spent your LIFE collecting a government check, so please stick a sock in it when it comes to ANYTHING involving the real world – because you don’t live there and have no idea what you are talking about. You have a government Nerf job playing with paint all day. Count your blessings and let the adults deal with the real world, mmmkay?
It gets better though! Porkchop Kuehne then lumps herself in with the heroes too! Listen to how thick Porkchop lays it on here:
“Personally, besides doing City council, I’m a teacher…and I put myself at risk every day”
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Sure you do Porkchop. The art teacher is apparently forgetting that SHE ALREADY HAD COVID. It was such a terrible case of Covid, in fact, that she didn’t even know she had it and stayed home to make panko porkchops:
I’m also assuming she went ahead and got vaccinated anyways despite having natural antibodies – because she is stupid like that. So now she is like, double and triple protected, right? At least that what libs have been yammering about all year – that the vaccine is a suit of armor. Hardly putting yourself at risk, Porkchop.
Oh, then there is the inconvenient fact that teachers are NOT at any higher risk of contracting Covid than anyone else:
Ouch. How can one person be wrong so many times in one breath? Truly, it boggles the mind.
The fact that Kuehne is (1) making million-dollar decisions on City council AND (2) teaching your children anything more than tying their shoes should scare the shit out of every Lampasshole in town.
Kids 17 and under are 127 times more likely to die of something NOT named “Covid-19”.
For math-challenged dummies like Bruce Haywood and Cathy Kuehne, that is 56,092 divided by 439 = 127.7
Also, take a gander at females under age 40. There have been 4,806 Covid deaths versus 100,865 all causes. In other words, TWENTY-ONE TIMES more deaths by things NOT named “Covid-19”. And remember, THOSE numbers include EVERYONE – even the morbidly obese and those with multiple co-morbidities.
If you are a healthy female under age 40, you really shouldn’t be getting the jab. Unfortunately, young females are a HUGE proportion of teachers and nurses – and the government is trying to force the jab on all of them. Many have caved in and put themselves at risk for no good reason.
Female and under 30? Even more ridiculous to get it – you are 37 times more likely to die of something else (51,834 versus 1,419). Yet you still see young chicks driving around alone with masks on.
I have been reading a VERY sharp guy since the Wuhan Flu got loose. The following was posted by him recently. Fairly long read but he makes a very compelling case that the VACCINATED are causing our recent problems. I know that I personally caught Covid from a person who got vaccinated and then got sick from the vax.
If this hypothesis proves out, then calling this an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” is 180 degrees wrong.
It would mean that the unvaxxed are being assaulted by the vaccinated because this vaccine program was incredibly ill conceived and the vaccines are not suited to task and that it, quite literally, was the vaccination programs themselves that have re-intensified what should have been a waning pandemic.
far more people have acquired immunity from having had and recovered from covid. this immunity is long lasting and extremely effective. (much more so than vaccines)
high risk cohorts were significantly reduced last year. there is less “dry tinder” now.
we have FAR more people vaccinated now. it’s 50-90% in many places and in many high risk groups. last year it was zero.
and yet in many of the high vaccine uptake places, we’re seeing deaths from covid (and excess mortality) rise to levels ABOVE last year.
this has led many to posit that vaccines not only don’t work, but that they make you worse.
but on an individual level, this does not appear to be true. (though there is quite a lot of evidence that vaccines induce higher risk in the two weeks post administration and that this is being accounted for dishonestly, added to the “unvaccinated” butcher’s bill, and artificially enhancing reported vaccine efficacy (VE).
BUT, even if we control for this, vaccines are showing efficacy in preventing deaths among the vaccinated. it’s more like 50% than the 90%+ being claimed, but VE against death in the 50%’s should still be showing BIG community effects with so many people in the high risk groups vaccinated.
all else equal even without vaccines, we’d expect to see attenuation in covid deaths for the reasons laid out above. instead we see acceleration.
the case rate in covid would need to be 3X last year to drive equivalent deaths and higher than that to show excess. but, it’s nothing like that, especially once you control for testing levels.
this is showing up in excess deaths as well as covid deaths, so the signal looks real.
the data has caused a lot of hand wringing and confusion.
grab a seat, because i have an idea to inject into the debate, i sincerely hope that i am wrong, and i suspect a fair few folks are not going to like hearing it, but it’s the best fit i can find for the data.
so here we go:
Theory: the current surge in covid deaths is caused by the vaccinated.
this combination makes those vaccinated with one dose or more into superspread bombs.
you get a surge of spread that gets misallocated (and used to inflate VE) and then you get the later breakthrough cases (because the vaccines do not stop infection and just mitigate severity)
these BT cases have massively high viral load (VL) in often asymptomatic superspreaders that pass on high loading doses to the unvaccinated and greatly worsen the overall pandemic.
this further inflates apparent VE by subjecting the unvaccinated to a more profligate and severe disease vector than they would have been had no vaccination campaign ever been undertaken.
perversely, if the vaccinated comprise a spread vector that accelerates deaths in the unvaccinated, that would make it look like vaccines work.
i want to stress, this is a hypothesis and a work in progress. it’s just the best fit to the facts i can find right now and i REALLY hope it’s wrong because if it’s right, this vaccination campaign is probably the worst health blunder in human history and the epidemiology and politics of that will get stunningly, surreally bad.
but if this hypothesis proves out, then calling this an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” is 180 degrees wrong.
it would mean that the unvaxxed are being assaulted by the vaccinated because this vaccine program was incredibly ill conceived and the vaccines are not suited to task and that it, quite literally, was the vaccination programs themselves that have re-intensified what should have been a waning pandemic.
if this validates, it’s not the unvaxxed threatening the vaxxed, it’s the vaccinated threatening everyone.
OK. that’s a lot to claim and there are a lot of hotlinks and cites above, but let’s add some more data to flesh this out.
we’ve seen the spikes in a great many places. they tend to follow vaccination pushes.
we know that vaccines are non-sterilizing and do not stop infection.
and many of them were asymptomatic. what this study did not assess was “did this vary between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated?” we could not tell if it was a property of delta or of inoculation status.
but this study sheds some light and that light looks to support the idea of this new and potent asymptomatic spread vector where none existed before.
here is the key finding: look at asymptomatic. i’m eyeballing, but did use a tool to do it, so it looks like a 3-4 Ct variance for vaxxed vs unvaxxed. each cycle is a doubling. so that’s a 8-16X variance in viral load. that’s the evidence we’ve been looking for and we ought to be doing A LOT more studies like this one to see if this proves out.
some have criticized this study for not expressing overall prevalence of cases in vaxxed vs unvaxxd, but the UK variants of concern data does this for us and show the vaxxed actually running at higher infection rates when we adjust for cohort size.
so i find the “well, the vaccines would be prophylactic on spread” argument fraught. the data does not support it.
others have countered with data like this from the FT (who have been frankly terrible on data all covid and seem to make up half of what they publish) but let’s take it at face value.
first off, it’s easy to see the rigging of the reporting. you can see the lag while they wait for the enhanced vulnerability right after dosing to clear. this is more bunker reporting.
meanwhile, societally, we see this.
and we see this below despite a 2/3 lower CFR variant, more natural immunity accumulation, depleted high risk cohorts, and a high vaccination rate. (data will be messy this week for yom kippur but next week should be useful)
the idea that this data is evidence that “vaccines are working at a societal level” seems increasingly iffy. but the fact that they do seem to show some efficacy (even fully loaded with the high risk period) on the individual level yet seemingly accomplish the opposite societal scale needs to be explained.
it looks to me like “the vaccinated become a superspread vector and re-kindle and re-intensify the pandemic” fits all this data and it’s very possible that “your vaccine does not only not protect me, it may put me at greater risk.”
and you can see spreads like this all over.
look at the US aggregate data. see the weird shelves that break the gompertz pattern starting in mid feb?
because that break in pattern lines up with this with just the sort of small lag you’d expect.
and now we’re seeing this as we look to be accelerating on all cause deaths despite all the vaccination and all the prior immunity, risk culling, and improvement in treatment and despite a far less deadly variant.
it’s even clearer in places that are already on the downside of seasonal surge and in vulnerable age groups (interestingly enough, with 85%+ vaccination rates).
this is DEEPLY counter to expectation if vaccines are working on a societal level or even from a world with no vaccines at all.
so, that’s the hypothesis.
i realize it’s provocative and not what people want to hear.
but i can find no better theory that fits all the facts. so, i send it forth into the world because maybe one of you can (and i really would like to be wrong here).
have at it. tear into it. find some contradictory data or a better explanation.
let’s do some science.
but your science must account for higher deaths despite more immunity and more vaccination from a variant with 1/3 the CFR that is nothing like 3X as prevalent.
it must explain surges in deaths following surges in vaccination.
it must explain apparent ~50% VE to the individual on deaths, but negative VE to the society as a whole around mass vaccination.
and for the love of francis bacon, please no appeals to authority. that’s laughably absent here.
the fact that we can even be seriously entertaining this issue underlines the reasons that vaccines, especially totally new modalities never before used in humans and with a laundry list of past safety and efficacy issues, undergo 6-10 years of study not 3-6 months of truncated and slanted review before being rolled out.
this has been a wild aberration in terms of practice and abrogation in terms of safeguards.
and they clearly got A LOT of this wrong.
remember the claims that the vaccine WOULD be sterilizing and stop infection and thus provide the backbone of herd immunity? they sure missed on that one.
it’s remarkable that having literally predicted 95%-100% mitigation in cases and gotten “cannot distinguish from 0%” that none of these “experts” or “authorities” have changed their policies or prescriptions.
hard to see that as “playing on the level” or “changing you mind as new evidence emerged.”
but that’s where we need to play if we want to get at the truth, even if it’s not a truth we want to hear.
Some 9,000 15,000 (updated) illegals are congregating under a the Del Rio bridge in south Texas. There are Haitians, Cubans and Venezuelans. You probably haven’t seen any of these pictures. That’s because Biden’s “solution” is to ban drone flights near the area so the public can’t get a good look at the situation. He is trying to sweep it under the rug:
One wonders how many third-world, poverty-stricken, unskilled border jumpers Clayton Tucker has invited to live in HIS house, since he is just fine with them pouring over the border.
Oh wait. He doesn’t have a house. He lives in the upstairs bedroom at his parents’ house at 208 S Western Street here in town. My bad.
But TJ Monroe is putting her to shame with some of the latest ridiculous money wasting going on now.
Here is a taste:
HOSTESS HOUSE:
In October 2019, when the City decided to take over the Hostess House, we were told it needed a few “minor repairs” and “minor decorations”. They spent about $6,000 on a new HVAC at that time also. So a normal person might think “eh, they’ll spend eight or nine grand on some stuff and that will be it”.
You’d be wrong. By August 2020, the new estimate was $500,000. [see page 20]
The CURRENT estimate is $1.3 million dollars. That’s $1,300,000.00 on an “event venue” that currently brings in MAYBE $10,000 per year in rental fees after expenses. So it will only take them 130 years to get their money back.
Only true shit head politicians could go from “a couple grand” to “$500,000” to “$1.3 million” and not blink an eye or maybe question if this was even REMOTELY a good use of funds. Clearly nobody learned a single thing from the $1.5 million Old City Hall debacle, because they are about to do the exact same thing AGAIN!
SKATE PARK:
WAY back in July 2020, a local school teacher heard a radio ad for a skate park/outreach center in California and thought “that would be cool!”
No, I am not joking. That is exactly how the whole thing started. Link to entire article is HERE. The name of her non-profit is “Wings of Eagles Outreach”.
Anyhow, we heard the usual nonsense about how this would be a public/private partnership and the usual hints were made that there would be private donations and volunteering…kind of like the “Bike and Hike” trail project that never went anywhere.
Initial skate park costs were said to be around $200,000. That was SO last year, though. NOW the estimate is $400,000 [see page 20] and I can guarantee you the final cost will be far higher.
Personally, I think the skate park is a terrible idea. Mike White and Misti Talbert were huge champions of this thing. Time will tell if it was worth it or not.
But the fact remains that we went from “I heard an ad on the radio! Sounds cool” to $200,000 to the current $400,000 tells you all you need to know about how TJ Monroe operates and how little she values tax dollars.
