Tag: Finley

City Council Throws ANOTHER $50,000 at Old City Hall Debacle

An additional $50,000 has been added to the Old City Hall debacle project as “contingency for possible expenses related to window treatments, landscaping and ‘additional improvements‘ [BLANK CHECK ALERT!].

Yes….it is a “contingency” amount.  I am willing to bet that not only will the entire $50,000 get spent, but another $15,000 on top of that if/when they decide they need ‘window treatments’ as fancy as the ones in Dallas or Austin.

The City is in receipt of “pay request #3” from the contractor, indicating 54% of project complete (they anticipate mid-December finish…HAHAHAHAHA).  Oh, and “there is some seeping on the walls, but he [who is he?  Doesn’t say] has consulted with the mechanical engineer”

Sounds like another disaster in the making.  Vague proclamations of seeping on the wall while an unknown person is supposedly looking into it.

How big is the pile of money they have set on fire now?  I’m seriously losing track.  Hold on while I peruse my own investigation notes….

…..ok.  Looks like we are getting very close to $1,500,000.00 now.  Between the change orders, the roof suddenly needing to be fixed (which JNW failed to notice when they collected $18,000 from Finley to do a structural analysis), now this $50,000…plus more to come.

Remember back in April of 2015 when city council was fighting over this entire project and $375,000 was set aside?  Then the first estimate came it at $750,000?  And Misti Talbert was all gung-ho for this train wreck anyways??  Saying she “couldn’t make an uninformed decision”?  I sure do.

So we went from $375,000 to $750,000 and now to DOUBLE THAT at $1,500,000.00 and STILL not done.  

I hope that when we fall into a recession (possibly next year) and sales tax receipts plummet and the city is staring a huge deficit in the face (because they will NEVER cut City Hall fat $100k salaries, we know that) and your taxes get raised YET AGAIN….well, I hope everyone remembers who was behind this colossal waste of money.

But hey, at least you can go look at your $100,000 TV sets hanging on the walls of your $1,500,000.00 City Hall for two hours twice a month during council meetings!  Woo hoo!  Money well spent.  Perhaps we should name it the Misti-Talbert-Finley-deGraffenreid-Azbell-Memorial-City-Hall so nobody forgets the great minds behind this project.

New Fiscal Year Begins – Finley and Crew Get a Big Raise!

The new budget was finally posted…and the higher-ups at City Hall got an early Christmas present!  Salary and benefits for City Manager Finley deGraffenreid and his assistant jumped almost 9% over last year.  That line item went from $296,000 per year up to $322,000 per year – totaling over $300,000 for the first time ever.  [For comparison, 10 years ago it cost $124,000 to “manage the city”.  So it appears to go up 10% a year without fail]  There were 54 resumes submitted for that Assistant City Manager job when it was created last year….now we know why!

The IT Department jumped a smaller amount…but don’t worry, they aren’t going to go hungry.  IT Director and her one-woman “department”, consisting of Kristy Acevedo, are making a combined $180,881 in salary and benefits this year.  You’d be hard-pressed to make that kind of money in the private sector with zero Cicsco or Microsoft real-world training certificates to your names.  But this ain’t the real world, baby!

Add it all up, and those four people ALONE are costing the taxpayers over $500,000 every year.  Cha-ching!!  That’s the kind of money that buys the brains and wisdom to spend almost $100,000.00 on an A/V system that REALLY only costs $34,000!

The weird thing is that even with two highly-paid  computer “experts”, the IT Department STILL hires outside companies to do consulting work and “IT support”, at even more expense to the city.

That’s right – TSM Consulting is paid $1,800 a month ($21,600 per year) for “IT support and includes on-site visits as well as remote management” for the City of Lampasas [City Council minutes Feb 22, 2016].  Isn’t that odd?  I would think that our two experts could handle basic IT stuff…but apparently not.

Sounds to me like just paying TSM $21,600 a year [line item 505-5395] and getting rid of one of our IT “experts” would save a TON of money.  But what do I know?  I’ve never been paid gobs of money to “manage” or “direct” city government…I just use common sense.

Timeline and Questions for Azbell $100,000.00 A/V Rip-off – PART I (Birth of a Bad Idea)

OK – so, I have spent about 48 hours reading through every single page of every city council minutes since January 1, 2013 (first available online) to try and piece together this Azbell debacle.  That means I have probably spent about 45 more hours than city council has spent on this to date.

Here is a synopsis timeline and my comments in bracketed italics.  I know some parts may make eyes glaze over, but PLEASE read it through – you will be shocked.  The incompetence is stunning.  I have also broken all this into six separate blog posts, so as to be digested easier.

Late 2013 and early 2014: City council gets a bug up their butt about needing new chambers.  I have no idea why new chambers were supposedly needed, but approximately $350,000 was earmarked for the project.  They hire an architect [JNW Architect at a cost of $35,000] and intermittently argue at council meetings over the rest of the year about whether this is a good use of funds.

AUGUST 24, 2014: Monica Wright returns to City Council with three bids for an audio/visual system [yes, this seems very premature since there aren’t even any plans yet, but this is par for the course…]

  1. Broadcast Works   $33,983.00
  2. Azbell    $41,184.00
  3. Whitlock  $54,411.36 

Monica then recommends they go with Broadcast Works.  Then-councilman Chris Toups moves to award the contract, and then-councilwoman (and current mayor) MISTI TALBERT seconds this motion.  It is then unanimously approved (Mike White is present at this meeting and approves).

All well and good.  Three bids were gotten, the lowest one wins, and the matter is settled.  Or is it?  [Why are they getting bids on an AV system before anything else is even decided on or planned out?  It would be like, oh I don’t know, buying $13,000 worth of chairs before you even had a blueprint….]

MARCH 30, 2015: Special minutes show that two bids came in for the new council chambers project.

  1. MW Hail Construction: $778,502
  2. RKJ Construction $793,379

OOPS!!!  These numbers are more than DOUBLE what they have budgeted!!

Council members stare, mouth agape and eyes boggling, and ask why it’s so much money?  They also asked why the bids were not broken down more.  Then deGraffenreid said he met with city attorney JC Brown, and she suggested NOT to meet with the contractors so there would be no hint of favoritism.  She suggested the bids be rejected and scope of services revised – she would then meet with the contractors and find out why bids were so high.

Jennifer Walker (JNW Architects) said she and city manager Finley will meet and try to figure this out.  She could not answer what drove the bid so high because the bids were not by component or broken down [Duuuhh…don’t ask me!  I’m just the $35,000 architect!]

April 13, 2015: This is where things really go off the rails and the sh*t hits the fan and fingers get pointed.  This is a good one, so read it all!

Apparently the big cost overrun is related to the base pad.  If they take out the base pad, and have the city build it, they can save $100,000 – but many contractors won’t build on a pad built by the city [liability, I’m guessing] and city crews do not have experience building pads.  Not to mention, it will take them away from their city jobs AND the project is STILL at least $250,000 over budget.  Mike White [to his credit] says he does not like the idea of the City crews building the pad.

Mayor Grayson, and council members Toups and White stated they do not feel comfortable constructing a building if it will cost $700,000 [YAY!  Fiscal sanity for a brief moment]

[This should have been the end of this disaster.  They wanted something…they budgeted X dollars…the bids were twice that…so they can’t do it.  End of story.  Who kept this train wreck going?  Who acted like 4-year-olds and said “I want I want I want I want”?]

Mayor Pro Tem Wanda Biershwale, Council members TJ Monroe, Chuck Williamson and Misti Talbert stated they would like to see new bids.

[Toups, White and Grayson clearly saw that this was a disaster-in-the-making and pushed against.  More than a few times, Toups stated the city had better uses for this money.  Monroe, Williamson, Talbert and Biershwale kept this disaster alive another day.  Biershwale is now gone but the others STILL sit on council and Talbert is mayor].

So…who bungled this so badly?  Finley’s name pops up a few times in the following discussion of “why is the cost double what we budgeted?”.  Some ‘answers’ were fleshed out:

It is then stated that the City has already incurred the following expenses for this debacle:

$28,338 on furnishings [yes, they were buying furniture before they even had a plan done – including $12,780 on 100 stacking chairs, because “we needed to spend our year end funds”]

$33,983 for AV bid [this is the Broadcast Works bid from above, and the minutes EXPLICITLY use the words ‘expenses INCURRED‘ – so did they already hand Broadcast Works $33,983?  Nothing would surprise me with this group]

$35,000 to JNW Architect, the geniuses in charge who didn’t think to get a cost analysis done first.  Total clowns.

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

$5,596 for Geotechnical engineering survey

With $100,000 already burned in this dumpster fire, Council goes looking for an explanation and maybe an ass or two to kick….and more than a few fingers are pointed at Finley.  To wit:

Council asks why the cost is double and why wasn’t a cost analysis done?  Now Finley does a bit of backpedaling, as the minutes state “the budgeted amount was suggested by Finley as just ‘a starting point for planning’ [ah yes…we can’t stick to a budget, so we’ll say it was just a starting point].

Furthermore, JNW Architect “did not do a cost analysis because it was not part of their contract with the city” – sounds like Finley bungling, since I’m guessing he wrote the contract (?).  Pretty big screw-up for a City Manager who has been doing this for at least 7 years.

Also, JNW Architect “designed the building by what the city wanted and not by what was budgeted” – say what???  This is a MASSIVE screw-up on either Finley’s part or the part of JNW.  This is a HUGE miscommunication at best.  Downright extreme incompetence at worst.

Was anyone taken to the woodshed over this?  Did heads roll?  Of course not.  This is City Government and par for the course.  So now Council decides they have three options going forward:

  1. Terminate agreements and end project [this is what should have happened].
  2. Change to a metal building to maybe reduce costs.
  3. Re-budget and cough up the money to “keep the WOW! factor the city deserves” [yes, they ACTUALLY SAID THAT…it is in the minutes.  Some of the people in charge of millions of dollars are making decisions on based on “wow” factors.  Presumably as in  “WOW, they are a bunch of morons to get ripped-off like that” or maybe “WOW! They must let the mentally retarded hold the purse strings in that city”]

Well…we all know they chose the worst option.  I will continue in Part II later today or tomorrow.