Overpaid Parasites Want 4.4% Raise. Will Be Even More Overpaid.

From today’s Lampasas Dispatch:

Notice of Public Hearing on Lampasas Central Appraisal District Budget

The Lampasas Central Appraisal District will hold a public hearing on a proposed budget for the 2020 fiscal year.

The public hearing will be held June 20th at 4:00pm at 109 East Fifth Street, Lampasas Texas. A summary of the appraisal district follows:

Total amount of proposed budget: $557,116

Total amount of increase over current budget: $19,229

Number of employees compensated under the proposed budget: 7

If approved by the appraisal district board of directors at the public hearing, this proposed budget will take effect automatically unless disapproved by the governing bodies of the county, school districts, cities and towns served by the appraisal district.

[End notice]

The new budget proposes $285,000 in salaries versus last year’s $273,000. Of course, in 2017 the salaries were $227,000 – so we see a 20% increase in 3 years (6.8% salary increase per year, on average).

The “Chief Appraiser” wants a 2020 salary of $75,177…PLUS benefits of another $13,023 ($5,262 for retirement and $7,761 for health care) – for a grand total of OVER EIGHTY-EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS cost to the taxpayer every single year…and it will only go up from here.

So we learn a few things here:

  1. These parasites want a 4.4% raise this year – despite the fact they create nothing and produce nothing.
  2. These parasites will ask for your opinion on the matter at 4pm on a work day…when productive citizens are at their private-sector jobs, earning the very funds the parasites want to steal.
  3. The City of Lampasas (I assume City council?) has the power to “disapprove” this proposed budget. Will they? [*update* – I am told they do not. Oh well…this will be approved. Taxpayer soaked again]
  4. Somehow, the county appraisers are able to get by on $7,761 per year in health benefits, while the average City Hall benefit is nearly twice that (anywhere from $11,000 to $14,000).

So here we have some of these parasites earning over $80,000 in a town where over 51% of residents have “low to moderate income”. How do I know that over 51% of Lampasas residents have “low to moderate income”? Because Assistant City Manager Gary Cox inadvertently told us so last week.

You see, Gary applied for a $500,000 grant with the Texas Department of Agriculture recently. The money would come from the Fire, Ambulance and Services Truck (FAST) Fund. It is money to replace a fire truck. In order to qualify for the grant, more than 51% of the city’s residents must have low to moderate income.

So, we have over half the city being described as “low to moderate income” and at the same time, these appraisal district parasites think they deserve a 4.4% raise. That sounds pretty outrageous to me. It would be nice if City Council sent a message and voted against this increase….but something tells me that won’t happen with the drunken sailors in charge.

$1,500,000.00 “Wow Factor” Public Meeting Room Will Not Be Used For Big Public Meeting Next Month

To those who pay attention to such things, a public meeting has been announced for June 17th at 6pm so all the whiners and complainers can whine and complain about (1) Community Planning (i.e. the $120,000 consulting contract handed to Halff Associates) and (2) City of Lampasas Budget Input (i.e. how big of a raise will Finley and Monica get this year?)

Here is the punchline: this big, important community meeting will be held in a school cafeteria. Why is this so funny to me? Well, I have a memory longer than three weeks, as it turns out. Let’s rewind quickly to September 25th, 2018 (8 months ago). Finley was busy covering his butt trying to explain to the citizens how $1.5 million dollars was a bargain price for new Council chambers and how a no-bid $95,000 A/V system was the deal of the century.

Part of his cover-his-ass story was that this vanity project was NOT just for City employees and City Council! No, no, no! To use Finley’s own words from the article, the Misti/Finley “wow factor” debacle was ALSO to “allow more public participation in council meetings [and] also will provide a place for various community groups to meet. City Manager Finley deGraffenried said the City Council’s vision is to have a facility that encourages public participation and “that could be seen as a hub” for a variety of meetings, civic activities and community groups.”

I would say a public meeting about the budget and community planning CERTAINLY fits the description of a “civic activity/meeting for a community group”. Pretty much EXACTLY what Finley described in his newspaper puff-piece 8 months ago.

So why not have this important civic meeting in the fancy new $1,500,000.00 Misti Talbert “Wow factor!” vanity project? I’m guessing there is one simple reason: it STILL isn’t completed!!

How far overdue is this vanity project? The article tells us that as well:

Later in the same article, Finley states that ASJ Construction was “50 days into the 120-day project” and that was on September 25th, 2018. Which means there were supposedly about 70 days remaining. December 4th, 2018 would mark 70 days after Finley made his statement.

Clearly the project was not done on December 4th, 2018. Not even close. Seeing as how the City will NOT be holding this important community meeting there on June 17th, that means the debacle project is now SIX MONTHS LATE (in addition to being about $500,000 more than projected).

The ease with which they just decided to have this meeting in a cafeteria and the ability of the cafeteria to hold the huge throngs (ha ha!) of people that will show up begs another question: why do we need a $1.5 million meeting room in the first place if an existing school cafeteria works just fine? A very good question…one I have been asking since last year when this monstrosity was started.

I’ll tell you why….the cafeteria just doesn’t have that “wow factor”, ya big dummy! Luckily we have wise civic leaders like Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert to push such huge, bold, wasteful “wow factor” projects through to completion…even if it is $500,000 over budget and 6 months behind!

Old City Hall “Wow Factor” Debacle Keeps Adding Up

The new pile of City Council packets brought more checks written for the Old City Hall Misty Talbert “Wow Factor” Vanity Project! ASJ Construction and Azbell Electronics will be throwing a huge party this Christmas. Hope Misti and Finley are invited! Here are some of the sums spent on the debacle project. This is by no means exhaustive. I’m sure I missed some stuff.

JNW Architects (the ones who bungled all kinds of things over the years – April 13, 2015): $56,020 over 5 payments between 2015 and 2017. It may be higher, but some of the checks are for “consulting” and it’s hard to say they were for the OCH debacle.

Azbell Electronics: $94,674 (this is for some TVs and microphones for City Council to use). Mind you, this system could have been had for $34,000 from Broadcast Works – but the money tree out back was bursting with cash, so why not spend it?? OVERPAY of $60,000.

RKJ Construction: $128,400 on an elevator (Austin Elevator bid $96,500 for this part of the project, but Council-genius Harrison wanted to “keep it local” and yank an extra $32,000 off the money tree out back). Well done! OVERPAY of $32,000 (elevator STILL not installed).

RKJ Construction: $13,500 to demolish interior of OCH and remove debris. This is the only contract I’ve seen that seems like a fair price. Go figure.

$12,780 for 100 stackable chairs. Monica purchased these FOUR YEARS AGO ($127 per chair) despite City Council meetings rarely exceeding 30 people. Where are the chairs now? Who knows. OVERPAY of $7,000.

$15,558 on other furnishings.

$8,055 for even MORE furnishings (Amazon Capital Services – page 18)

$7,313 for curbing and a pad for generator.

$5,596 for “geotechnical engineering study” – sounds like kissing the ring of Pope Eckermann.

ASJ Construction: Tons of checks here since they are the main contractor. Checks in the amount of: $134,692 $143,336 $211,435 $166,301 $153,458 $42,069 $45,162 $45,714 $45,514 $26,000 $14,732… and we aren’t done yet!!

The capper? ASJ also just billed the city $11,310 for “reception desk – city hall“. Did we just pay over eleven thousand dollars for a $&*%(^* desk??? I think we did. WOW Factor!! OVERPAY $6000

$60,000 for a fire suppression system – no idea who sells and installs this. Fire Department?

$7,500 for “phone” and “fiber patch”

Roughly $12,000 to remove bats from the building.

$45,194 to re-roof a roof that I’m pretty sure JNW Architects said was
“structurally sound” three years earlier (Oct 2016 JNW was paid $18,500 for “structural analysis and provide documentation” of said analysis).

Tonight they will discuss spending $27,850 to “improve parking lot conditions behind City Hall”.

What does it all add up to? A LOT. I remember the good old days (circa 2015) when the Grayson/White/Toups crew didn’t even want to spend $400k on this. Look at them now – around $1,500,000.00 and counting! Well done!!

How Many Hours They Actually Put In

Since I started this whole journey with the Azbell Electronics no-bid $94,000 “Ferrari of A/V systems” contract in the IT Department, I thought it fitting to start there when it comes to ACTUAL hours worked.

After requesting a “payroll history report” for a certain IT Department head, I came up with the following. Remember, there are 26 pay periods of 80 hours each (40 hours per week for two weeks). Fifty-two weeks times 40 hours yields 2080 hours as the maximum. Of course, very few people work a 40 hour week for all 52 weeks of the year (except tons of small-business owners, but whatever).

We’ll assume two weeks vacation and some sick days thrown in there. So the normal private-sector worker probably works about 1950 hours per year, maybe. Here are the number of hours worked per year for the IT Department head:

2013 1827.5 hours (equivalent to over 6 weeks vacation)

2014 1798.5 hours (equivalent to over 7 weeks vacation)

2015 1730.5 hours (equivalent to 8.7 weeks vacation – well over 2 months)

2016 1711.5 hours (equivalent to 9.2 weeks vacation – 2 months plus a week)

2017 1736.5 hours (equivalent to 8.5 weeks vacation – two months)

2018 1725 hours (equivalent to 8.8 weeks vacation – well over two months)

So over just those 6 years, we see about 48 weeks off of work – or nearly a year! Work 5 full years – take almost a year off….fully paid, of course.

Or put differently, if an employee costs the taxpayer $110,000 per year but only puts in 1725 hours of “work”, it is costing the taxpayer almost $64 per hour of “work”.

This also doesn’t take into account the $1800 per month the City pays TSM Consulting to be on call for all the network issues that TWO City IT employees aren’t capable of doing. Nor does it count the thousands of dollars to Cardinal Tracking Inc. or random guys named Neil Cardwell. Nor does it count all the other chunks of money like the “appreciation pay” she gets at Christmas or the “longevity pay” she gets for X number of years polishing a seat with her rear end.

So not only is the pay FAR higher than the private sector…the hours are far less too! Gotta love it. The question remains: will Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert have the guts to freeze or even cut salaries this year? Or will they do what they always do…spend, spend, spend?

City Now Spends Quarter of a Million per MONTH on City Employee Benefits

Packets for the May 13th City Council meeting have been posted on-line. Of great interest to me are the large checks written monthly for health insurance premiums and retirement contributions.

For the first time (that I ever remember seeing) these now total OVER $250,000 PER MONTH – a run-rate of $3 MILLION per year.

Check #150608 to Scott & White – $118,245.76

Check #150616 to Texas Municipal Retirement System – $141,536.69

For a grand total of $259,782.45 for the month of April 2019….an annual run-rate of $3,117,389.40 or over $28,000 per employee (assuming 110 employees)

Do YOU, fellow tax slave, get to put away over $2,300 per MONTH for your retirement and health insurance? I highly doubt it.

So how fast has this expense item exploded over the last two administrations? I have that data too. EXACTLY four years ago, the numbers were as follows (page 65):

May 2015: Scott and White $86,307.20

May 2015: Texas Municipal Retirement System $78,120.81

For a grand total of $164,428.01 – a difference of $95,354.44 per MONTH. This represents an INCREASE of 58% in just four short years – or 14.5% increase PER YEAR!!

Now, the dummies in charge might not know about the Rule of 72, but I learned it in grade school. That rate of increase implies a DOUBLING of benefits every 5 years or so (5.12 to be precise). To say that is unsustainable is a huge understatement.

Will any “leaders” have the balls to cut spending? Or will it be more of the same?

Lampasas Government Personnel Costs – Nearing $80,000 Per Employee

City budgeting is slowly getting underway for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. So I thought it a good time to reflect on government worker pay. One good question I had: what are the TOTAL personnel costs for all city government workers?

That number was easy to find in 2015: according to the July 25th minutes of that year, there was a 4% increase to a grand total of $7,207,856

Since employee count seems to bounce between 100 and 110, I will be conservative and assume 110 employees – or $65,525.96 per employee.

What was the number for 2018? Tough to say, as I was unable to find the exact quote from Finley for that year. I am going to request that number from City Hall today. However, we can make an educated guess.

In July of 2018, as Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert was advocating salary increases for city workers, it was stated that each 1% increase impacted the taxpayer by $61,000 – which tells us that salary expenses were around $6,100,000 last budget.

We also know from Finley’s own admission (Aug 8, 2016) that “City worker benefits comprise 40.8% of salary expense” – 24.3% is retirement, FICA and workers comp while 16.5% is health insurance.

SO – we take $6,100,000 and multiply by 1.408 and we get $8,588,800 for total personnel costs (or a 19% increase in 3 years – a 6.4% increase per year)

If we are charitable and divide this by 110 employees, we come up with $78,080 per employee per year.

If we go with 100 city employees, we get $85,888 per year. I have no idea what the exact current headcount is for Lampasas City government but it is somewhere in that range.

That $78,000 per year is ridiculous enough…but wait til you see how many (or how few) hours some employees actually work each year! Coming soon….

Something to Remember as Our City Budget is Currently Being Discussed

Finley and his merry gang will be huddled over tables for the next month or two, deciding on who gets what from the public trough. I have long said that the higher-ups at City Hall are paid far out of proportion to reality, common sense and the private sector.

(For instance, we have TWO people in the IT “Department” who cost the taxpayer $197,000 per year – and neither one possess the credentials that would be expected (nay, demanded) in the real world. As a result, they end up paying tens of thousands of dollars MORE annually to outside consultants (such as TSM Consulting, Cardnial Tracking, and some dude named Neil Cardwell) to do their job for them).

Well, seems the Census Bureau just proved me right – the following is an article taken from the news:

Which class of full-time, year-round American workers has the highest median earnings? Is it the class that works for private-sector employers? Is it the class that works for the government? Or is it the entrepreneurial class, who are self-employed?

According to the Census Bureau’s Personal Income Table 07 (PINC-07), the competition isn’t close. When it comes to making money in the modern United States of America, government workers win.

Among Americans who actually earn income by working, they are the upper class.

In 2017, according to PINC-07, there were 115,704,000 Americans who worked full-time (at least 35 hours per week) and year-round (at least 50 weeks in the year). The table divides these workers into three general classes: “private wage and salary workers,” “government wage and salary workers” and “self-employed workers.”

Of the full-time year-round workers, 88,296,000 were private-sector employees; 17,617,000 were government employees; and 9,750,000 were self-employed. (Another 42,000 were classified as “unpaid family workers.”)

The overall median earnings for all of these full-time year-round workers in 2017 were $48,500.

Workers in private industry, however, made less than the overall median. Their median earnings were $46,797.

The self-employed did a little better than the national rate. Their median earnings were $50,383.

But government workers did the best. Their median earnings were $53,435.

That was 14.2 percent better than private-sector workers and 6.1 percent better than the self-employed.

The Census Bureau also divided government workers into two categories. Federal government workers comprised one category, numbering 4,178,000 individuals. State and local government workers comprised the other, numbering 13,439,000.

The median earnings of state and local government workers ($51,202) were higher than the median earnings in any of the four categories of private-industry and self-employed workers.

Questions For Misti Talbert

So here are a few questions for Misti “Spend like a drunken sailor’ Talbert as she starts her second term as mayor:

Did you learn anything from the $1,500,000.00 Old City Hall renovation debacle?  Are you proud that you backed it from the very beginning (“WOW factor!”) and supported it from start til finish?  Or can you finally see it for the colossal waste that it was?

How about the part where Azbell Electronics won a $96,000 contract with no other bids…despite the fact you sat on city council the FIRST time the exact same contract was bid and awarded to Broadcast Works for $34,000? 

Were there ANY repercussions when you found out city employees pulled the wool over your eyes on the Azbell contract? Did anyone get a stern talking to? Fired? Punished at all? I have posted internal city hall emails showing conclusively that Monica tried her best to keep Council in the dark and Gary Cox was very aware Azbell was FAR more expensive than other vendors. Or do you like being treated with such blatant disrespect?

Is it your opinion that the mayor and city council are the boss of Finley, or are you content that it seems to be the other way around?

Are you going to continue handing Eckermann Engineering hundreds of thousands of dollars in no-bid engineering work? 

Are you cool with increasing the salary/benefits of your highest-paid city employees like Finley, Gary and Monica by 5% to 9% every single year? Do you have ANY plans to trim ANY government spending at all? Or is it 7% increases as far as the eye can see?

Do you think it might be a good idea to have at least ONE of your IT employees get qualified in network administration (by Microsoft, Cisco, etc), since they are costing the city hundreds of thousands in salary and benefits annually yet they spend another $30,000 or so per year to hire TSM Consulting to do the network jobs THEY should be capable of doing themselves? Monica Wright has been on the public teat for OVER THIRTEEN YEARS and has exactly ZERO certifications in network administration….which means she has to pay TSM consulting tens of thousands of dollars annually to do such simple tasks as a server migration.

How many more millions does the Lampasas Economic Development Corp (LEDC) have to waste on the “business park” before you second guess your decisions there?  One million?  Two million? 

How many more $8,000 videos promoting Lampasas will the city pay for with zero results?  How many more TML conferences will the city pay for with $1000 worth of hotel rooms, so the LEDC staff can go spin their wheels in more conferences and seminars with no results?  How many more “consulting” contracts will you piss away money on?   HALFF is now getting $120,000 to do the job that LEDC has been wasting $100,000 per year to (not) do.  Do you think that is money well spent?

Not once in all her current self-congratulatory interviews has Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert made any mention of being the least bit concerned about the idiotic and wasteful spending of her administration and the administration before her.

One thing is sure – Talbert’s second term will provide me endless fodder and many boneheaded decisions to ridicule. 

Eckermann Engineering: A Snout Deep in the City Tax Trough

When you spend a ridiculous amount of time looking at just about every page of the City Council minutes, budgets and “expenditures over $4,000” category of Council packets (as I do), one thing REALLY stands out: Eckermann Engineering is paid a LOT of money by the City of Lampasas.

How much?

Well, just doing my own peck-and-hunt search through the year 2017, I came up with over $290,000 spread over at least a dozen “small” payments. You see $11,650 here…maybe $8,625 there….then another $11,925 the next month….followed by a fat $22,650 again the following month.

Seems ludicrous. My first thought was that this had to be wrong. After all, wouldn’t it be WAY cheaper to just put an engineer on staff if they need all this “engineering” all the time? After all, a decent engineer can probably be hired for around $65,000 and he would then be at the city’s disposal for any cockamamie and idiotic idea that may need some “engineering” (for instance, a convention center that never should have been entertained as an idea but somehow was).

Where do I come up with that $65,000 number? Well, straight from the website of the company that the City of Lampasas just hired for $120,000 to do yet ANOTHER “study” (pages 110-118) and to plan the future “economic development” of Lampasas….HALFF Associates.

[Wait…we are paying HALFF Associates $120,000 to come up with an economic development plan for Lampasas? Don’t we already have the Lampasas Economic Development Corporation hard at work on this for the last 6 years? Yes….yes we do. So why exactly have we been shelling out $100,000 per year to the LEDC staff to go to workshops, round-tables, seminars, conventions, and committee meetings to come up with “mission statements”, “vision statements” and all the other buzz words that try to justify that $100,000 per year? Good question. But we’ll get to the LEDC later. Back to Eckermann’s snout in the City trough]

So…I figured I had to be wrong about this ludicrous sum paid to Eckermann in 2017. I then requested a copy of all checks paid to Eckermann Engineering from January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2018. Here are the results – and they are shocking (totals are approximate as I rounded down):

  • 2012 $67,000
  • 2013 $200,000
  • 2014 $86,000
  • 2015 $92,000
  • 2016 $84,000
  • 2017 $301,000 (!!!)
  • 2018 $74,000

Grand total over this period is 110 different payments for a total of $924,355.50!!! Or $132,000 per year.

That’s not including the fat chunks of money the Lampasas Economic Development Corp (LEDC) has thrown at Eckermann to play around in their ridiculous Business Park (aka, the 165 acre weed patch). How much has LEDC thrown at Eckermann? I have those numbers too:

  • 2014 $36,000
  • 2015 $105,000 (!!!)
  • 2016 $24,000

Grand total of 18 payments for $168,740.

I’m also pretty sure City Council just agreed to hand Eckermann $100,000 to “develop the business park” – since the business park has been sitting there as an empty weed patch for over 7 years now. Also pretty sure Eckermann wanted $125,000 to develop it a month earlier, but then gave city council the bargain price of $100,000. Don’t quote me on either of those numbers – I have to go back and re-read the LEDC minutes and the City Council minutes.

This is a “Business Park” that has cost a FORTUNE with nothing to show for it. They spent huge sums of money running electricity and water to this “business park” years ago (close to a MILLION DOLLARS), and it still sits there, a giant weed patch. I will be spilling some ink on the business park boondoggle as soon as I get all my numbers together. The Business Park Boondoggle makes the City Hall “Wow Factor” Boondoggle look like small potatoes.

So, I guess I have several questions for City Hall and City Council:

ONE: Since you get multiple bids on just about everything else (except A/V systems, of course), why is Eckermann handed every single job the city comes up with? I know there are several other engineers around. Why are they not asked to bid some of these jobs? I have it on fairly good authority there are much cheaper alternatives.

TWO: If bidding some of these jobs out doesn’t drastically reduce the costs (I’m almost certain it would) then why not put a city engineer on staff for a salary FAR less than the outrageous sums you hand to Eckermann every year without bids or questions?

THREE: Why are the Eckermann bills to the city not broken down by hourly rate? As far as I can see, it shows stuff like “survey – $7,900” and that’s it. What is their hourly rate? How many hours do these jobs take? This absolutely reeks of huge scams and pork projects. I lived in Chicago for 15 years – I know a nest being feathered when I see it. Apparently City Council and Mayor Talbert don’t.

It isn’t the year 1970 with some engineer hunched over his paper with a slide rule designing the Empire State Building. It’s the year 2019 and these engineers use AutoCAD and other powerful tools. Don’t tell me it takes 100 hours at $150/hour to “engineer” a fricking water line. No way.

Maybe Mayor Talbert has the answers as she seeks her second term?

New Info Emerges From City Hall Emails – Did City Manager and IT Director Deliberately Keep City Council in the Dark Over Exorbitant Cost of A/V System?

In short, the answer appears to be yes.

We have requested and received dozens of internal City Hall emails pertaining to the no-bid City Council chambers A/V system that was awarded to Azbell Electronics for almost $100,000 last July.

Emails belonging to the city manager, assistant city manager, city IT Director, Azbell sales rep Chris Anelundi and others involved in the expensive boondoggle were obtained through a Texas Open Records Request. They show city employees who have zero regard for tax dollars and who go out of their way to keep city hall in the dark over the true costs of the project.

The emails show the following information:

  • City Hall (IT Director, City Manager, assistant City manager) DID set out to re-bid the A/V system a second time around: Azbell and Broadcast Works were actively seeking to win the bid in Jan and Feb of 2017. This destroys Finley’s story he concocted (after the fact) that they didn’t need to re-bid the project since Azbell was a “buy board” member.
  • Assistant City Manager Gary Cox was well aware at the very start of this that Azbell was MUCH higher priced than other vendors. He pointed this out to Monica Wright – even giving an example of a video recorder he found for $2880 for which Anelundi and Azbell were charging $4880 – he called this “a significant markup over other vendors” in a private email to Monica dated Feb 8th, 2018.
  • ACM Gary Cox requested several bells and whistles for the project that added many thousands of dollars to the cost and weren’t really needed, but were fancy add-ons (including cameras and a wireless mike for the audience so audience members wouldn’t have to make the long walk up to the podium to speak on a normal microphone)
  • Broadcast Works was contacted by email by Monica (Dec 2016 through Feb 2017) and told the project was back on and there would be a second round of bidding. The Broadcast Works rep (Adam Comer) REPEATEDLY sent Monica emails expressing his hope to win the business, all the way through Feb and March 2017. Poor Adam was strung along, as Finley and Monica moved forward with Azbell behind his back – making the decision themselves to just go ahead with Azbell and not bothering to get a second bid. They did not even give Broadcast Works a chance to bid a second time after contacting them in Jan/Feb 2017 asking them to do just that!
  • Monica Wright was aware that Azbell had previously bid on this contract (and lost to Broadcast Works for being far more expensive) – she then informed current sales rep Chris Anelundi of this and even sent Anelundi the previous Azbell losing bid package (which was around $42,000)
  • Monica Wright SPECIFICALLY discouraged Anelundui from giving any hard numbers during his council presentation on March 13, 2017…going so far as to write in her email: “as far as budget numbers go, we won’t mention that to City Council Monday night” then adding that “the City Manager wants Council to know what all is involved with this project….if they know the capabilities of the A/V system, the components and equipment needed to achieve what we want, hopefully their jaw will not drop when we ask for approval.” [Editor note: sure sounds to me like they knew damn good and well this thing was ridiculously overpriced]
  • When the time came in July 2018 to actually go and ask for the ludicrous sum Azbell wanted for this vanity project, Monica appeared to have reservations about the cost again, writing in an email to Anelundi: “I am hoping they just award the contract and move on“

She got her wish. City Council rubber-stamped this thing with only feeble objections over the expensive earpieces for the hard-of-hearing.

In an email shortly thereafter, Anelundi (sounding quite amazed) asks “And just so I am clear, the approved amount totaled $94, 674.57 correct?” almost as if he can’t believe this group of wizards just ponied up TRIPLE the amount that Broadcast Works was going to do the job for a couple years earlier and well over DOUBLE the amount of the original, rejected Azbell bid of around $42,000 from just a few years earlier.

Digest that again: Council rejected Azbell’s original bid of $42,000 as it was about 25% more than the winning Broadcast Works bid (around $34,000). Then Monica comes back 2 years later, says “we’re finally doing this project”, tells Anelundi that his company, Azbell, was the losing bid last time around at $42,000 and then City Council goes on to APPROVE A NO-BID contract of almost NINETY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS to Azbell. I’m guessing Anelundi popped the champagne bottles that night, truly amazed at his good fortune.

Now, blame still falls squarely on City Council for approving this monstrosity and not asking any questions. Several council members were sitting in their seats the FIRST time this thing went through the bidding process [**cough Misti Talbert cough**] and the winner was Broadcast Works at $34,000. Somebody should have asked why this wasn’t competitively bid again. Somebody should have asked how the hell $95,000 was justified. Of course, Finley and Monica did their best to starve them of information on cost until the very last second, when they rammed this turd through in July 2018. Plenty of blame to go around.

The difference being City Council is an unpaid position, whereas Finley, Gary and Monica are quite highly paid – ostensibly because they are “experts” and “competent” and supposedly know what they are doing. I’d say this proves otherwise in the extreme.

The scariest part of all this? This debacle is just ONE item that popped up in the newspaper and seemed SO ridiculously over-the-top on price, that I was just enraged enough to spend a considerable chunk of my own time and money to find out what really happened. If I managed to hit the jackpot like this on my very first attempt, imagine all the other shenanigans that go on over there ALL THE TIME because nobody is paying attention.

THIS is the “leadership” that Misti Talbert supposedly exhibits as mayor? Please. Gimme a break. Talbert has pushed for this wildly overpriced boondoggle for years – as recorded in City Council minutes and chronicled here.

Perhaps a restructuring of incentives is needed at City Hall. I think the following would be a good start:

1 Make City Council a paid position and hold their feet to the fire for massive screw-ups like this one. The colossal sums wasted by the LEDC (Lampasas Economic Development Corporation) are another example.

2. Sharply reduce the salaries of these “experts” at the top of City Hall, since they have proven they do not have the taxpayers’ interests at heart, but only their own.

3. Have an outside entity go over the entire structure of City Hall to identify positions that are unneeded and/or paid grossly out of line with their private sector counterparts (and yes, the $30k per year in benefits counts towards their salary). Maybe take a look at what a lot of these people ACTUALLY do all day long (besides post on Facebook, go to loads of useless conferences with other city employees in other towns, and waste massive amounts of time and money planning a $1.5 million vanity project for City bigwigs)

Clearly, there needs to be a more adversarial role between Council and City Hall – especially the City Manager. Council should be looking out for the taxpayer since Finley and others at the top of City Hall clearly only look out for themselves.

Will any of these things happen? No. I’ll be called a trouble-maker and a pot-stirrer for daring to point out anything that might call into question the genius of those in charge. Better to just bury your head in the sand and let some government sponges hose the taxpayer over and over then ask for more.