Tag: Eco-Turd

Eco-Strong Turd Floats Back To Surface in Lampasas County Breaking News.

Back again from the depths of the toilet bowl. The Eco-Strong turd that refuses to be flushed!!

It’s ‘better for municipalities’ because they are the only ones dumb enough to pay 5x more than a traditional fence

I have no idea who TJ Wright is. From what I see on-line, he seems like a respected businessman who runs several companies from fencing to pools and other stuff. I don’t know how much of all those are HIS businesses and which are other businesses he just pushes in some kind of reciprocal agreement.

I hope to god he hasn’t put a dime into Eco-Strong because he will likely regret it down the road.

First of all, these fences are priced WILDLY higher than a normal fence. If you ask for a price on Facebook, you will not get an amount posted publicly, because it is outrageous and they know people will shit their pants and never pay that amount.

How outrageous?

Well, a 500-foot fence will cost you about $47,000 if you want it to be six feet tall. That is over $90 PER LINEAR FOOT.

They try to justify this cost by telling us it “lasts a lot longer”. Really? Does it last six times longer? Can you prove that? Are there any of these sitting around that were built ten or twenty years ago that prove this concept?

Or will Mike Cour (the scumbag who runs Eco-Strong) decide to disappear or go bankrupt before your fence turns ten and you need to collect on that warranty?

Eco-Turd uses the same argument to push rubber sidewalks too. But the truth is that there is no evidence at all that the extra cost is made up for by longevity. Just ask some of the cities in California who have been dumb enough to try rubberized sidewalks:

“After years of experiments with different materials and iterations of rubberized sidewalks, the city’s not sure the idea will work. “It has not panned out from a maintenance standpoint as we expected,” says Sylvester Mabry Jr., manager of Street and Fleet Services for the city of Santa Monica. He says the original impetus for investing in rubberized panels was their estimated 7-to-10 year lifespan, which would have calculated out to be cheaper in the long run than the regularly required tear-outs and re-pours of concrete sidewalks.Mabry says many of the rubberized panels lasted just two years, and the city has stopped installing more until they can achieve the desired lifespan.“

You might also want to ask the poor saps who invested in Triton Financial how their associations with Mike Cour turned out.

Clearly TJ has never read here. So for his sake, I’m going to link to some Eco-Strong articles I have written in the past. Feel free to use the search function to find more. Just search for “Eco-Turd” or “Eco-Flex” or “Mike Cour”.

Somebody Has Some ‘Splaining To Do Regarding Eco-Strong, Mike Cour and the ‘Business’ Park Money Pit

Eco-Flex False Press Release – Part II

Eco-Flex Can’t Get Their Stories Straight – PART III

Eco-Flex and Mike Cour – Bonus Part IV

Alan Champagne and Mike Cour Caught Lying Red-Handed – Part I

More Eco-Turd Discrepancies…

Eco-Turd Being Pushed Even Harder By LEDC. I Am About To Blow Them Out Of The Toilet Water…

Has The Eco-Turd Finally Been Buried?

Poor Mike Cour. Trying to push fences that cost 5x more than normal in THIS economy! Good luck with that, buddy.

** UPDATE 12/5 **

Ruh roh. Rolling out the discounts already. So that $46,000 fence is now only $32,000? What a deal! I think I’d stick with the old-fashioned kind for about $10,000. Plus, these things are fugly as hell…

I’m seriously wondering if those are Photoshopped. Reminds me of the scene in Fargo where he buries the briefcase with $920,000 in it and looks both ways down the fence line and it just goes on and on for miles. Nobody would possibly pay $90 a foot for a half mile of this shit.

More Thoughts On Eco-Turd…

The more I think about it, the less sense it makes for Alan “private jet” Champagne to ship crumb rubber 2,200 miles to Lampasas just to stamp it into the exact same products he is ALREADY making in Alberta.

Like, why not just use the plant, equipment and labor you ALREADY HAVE up there in the Great White North to make all this shit and then ship THAT finished product 2,200 miles to your fellow weasel Mike Cour here in Lampasas?

The shipping costs should be approximately the same and you save millions by not building a second “manufacturing plant” in Lampasas. It makes no sense, unless…(and this is ALL conjecture on my part – I have no evidence for any of these musings. I’m just using logic and reason here – something lacking at the LEDC)….

#1 – The Alberta plant is about to go bankrupt. Maybe the Eco-Flex turd is about to go bust and Alan is covering it all up by saying he is “moving the headquarters to Texas”. This would maybe allow him to grab MORE free money. Mike Cour sure seemed eager to grab more money for “moving headquarters” back in 2020:

Desperation is a stinky cologne, Mike

Maybe all this “free” grant money comes with even more bonus cash if you “move a headquarters”. Who knows? But if the plant in Alberta was about to go tits-up, it would be a clever move to kill two birds with one stone.

#2 – There is some kind of huge tariff/tax on finished goods. Maybe the Canadian or U.S. government taxes the shit out of “finished goods” crossing the border but not so much on “commodity” inputs like crumb rubber. If the tax were big enough on Eco-Turd’s finished goods, it would save them a ton of money to just ship the crumb rubber to the U.S. and “manufacture” their stuff here.

If THAT is the case, then the LEDC should realize Eco-Turd is ALREADY getting a huge financial boost by avoiding these taxes and there is no need to hand them even more “free” stuff at the expense of the Lampasas taxpayer. These idiots will NEVER, EVER employ 200 people, so if THAT is the reason you’re throwing free shit at them, you better rethink your plan.

LEDC Swallowing More Bullshit and Hype. Will They Never Learn??

Looks like the Lampasas Economic Dunces Club is at it again. Not since Jack sold his cow for some magic beans have we seen economic wizardry like they practice over at the LEDC.

First it was Mike Cour and his Eco-Turd scam. The LEDC (desperate to make a deal and finally get a tenant for their multi-million-dollar Goat Pasture) was strung along by ridiculous promises made by a charlatan. It was obvious to me how it would end, but apparently Talbert, Monroe and Walsh are a little more naive.

Unfortunately, they didn’t learn from that debacle. So they’re about to create another one.

From today’s packet:

I see a LOT of the same words and phrases that I have seen before and which indicate a high likelihood of bullshit. Words like “intending”, “proposing possibilities”, “hope”, “initially” and “up to” $30/hour. Mike Cour used a lot of the same bullshit words himself when he was proposing his ridiculous tire recycling facility.

Lots of wiggle room there. Do you know what wiggle room gets filled up with eventually? Bullshit. Lots and lots of bullshit. That, and failed promises. Which is why these deals are always heavily loaded on the back end: in a few years when it all goes to shit, who is going to care enough to point out what a train wreck it all was? Besides me, of course.

Here is how it will probably go down (and this is my opinion, not fact):

This guy gets a sweetheart deal on a lease. He then charges people to store their boats and RVs there – which employs nobody while all the money goes into his pocket. Not much risk to him there – he gets a free swing of the bat to see if he can get people to store their stuff there. In fact, if the idiots at the LEDC give him enough free stuff, he can also undercut any competitors in the area!

At the one year mark, he maybe tells the City that the market just isn’t quite right yet for the other stuff – after all, Brandon has been fucking up the economy for two years now! Can you blame me?? Can I keep using this as a storage space for another year? The LEDC agrees to this because they have fallen for the Sunk Cost Fallacy over and over again and they don’t want to admit failure.

At the end of the second year, same song and dance. Maybe the guy offers a ridiculous low-ball price to buy the property hoping an embarrassed LEDC will just puke it up to avoid more hassle.

The cigar bar and distillery and barber shop stuff? All bullshit. Will NEVER happen. Ever. We heard this “distillery/brewery” story before over two years ago when some guy was going to develop the Sante Fe train station. Remember that? I do – I called it bullshit then and it is bullshit now.

From two years ago:

Several meetings ago, Council was briefed regarding the redevelopment of the Santa Fe Depot to a restaurant and possible brewery. Although the tenants have not been identified by the developer [shocker…I doubt there are any yet], he has proceeded with construction plans, specification and bidding. Mister Hardin has also discussed the possible partnership with the City to fund a portion [is that like ‘cost sharing’??] of the right-of-way improvements including sidewalks and flatwork – which may be between $80,000 and $100,000

There it is again – “possible”. As in, it is POSSIBLE someone will give me a free G5 private jet tomorrow. But I’d be a fool to plan a $15,000 honeymoon around that.

City Forced To Turn Over LEDC ‘Business’ Park Prospect Impact Study

Well, score one for the taxpayer and the little guy.

Despite JC Brown and Finley’s best efforts to stymie me, the “impact study” the City had conducted for Eco-Strong as a viable candidate to be a “business” park tenant is now in my hands.

I think this is the first time the Attorney General has sided with me. The score may be something like 4-1 in favor of City attorney JC Brown and Mayor “Transparency” Talbert, but that’s ok. It’s nice to finally win one.

I started perusing the docs yesterday and I can already say, it looks like a whole lot of numbers pulled from asses. I will post more detailed analysis over the next week or so, but there are a few tidbits below. I figured the taxpayers of Lampasas would like to know what their City is considering getting into:

[If you need to brush up on Eco-Strong, please start HERE]

They are proposing the following:

“A 35,000 square foot facility that will recycle 500,000+ tires per MONTH”.

By my math, that is 16,600 tires EVERY SINGLE DAY moving through the “business park”. Sounds like absolute horseshit to me. Assume you had a truck big enough to carry 1000 tires at a time (a random guess by me). That means a truck pulling in there every hour between 5am and 10pm. Every single day. Forever.

I don’t buy that shit for a minute.

“The firm will initially have 30 workers – the initial average annual salaries of these workers will be $33,000”

Wow. Those are some high-paying, high-tech jobs there, Mandy! Shoveling tire crumbs into a furnace, or however they do it, for about $16/hr. I think I’d rather work my way up at Wal-Mart to $16 in a year or two, but that’s me.

Has anybody given a moment’s thought to JUST the massive amount of traffic required to transport 500,000 tires worth of material into and then back out of the property every month? The pollution?

I doubt it.

There is much, much more. We’ll be back soon with all of it.