Tag: health care

Old City Hall and Azbell Screw Job – Part VI (2018 – The Current Mess)

At the end of the last chapter, you could see Finley lubing up his fist and instructing City Council to bend over.  He has some new info on the Old City Hall Hose Job….here is the home stretch leading us to today:

May 14th, 2018: Finley dumps the 1.4 million pound anvil onto Council’s pointy heads.  Without bothering to present the losing bids, he states that ASJ Construction was lowest qualified bid…and the following is the current situation

  1. Base bid $890,000
  2. Alternate #1 $25,000
  3. Alternate #2 $128,000
  4. Total price $1,043,000

EXCLUDED from this bid are the $125,000 for the elevator….the $60,000 for fire suppression…the $88,000 already incurred…and of course the ridiculous $83,000 audio/visual screw job, which is apparently untouchable – though for some strange reason, it says in parenthesis “some savings possible” – which is hilarious because it will end up being almost $100,000 by the time it hits the newspapers 60 days from this meeting.

So we are now at around $1,400,000…which doesn’t include cabinets, counter-tops, dais, signage, and flat work.  Unsurprisingly, Finley recommends Council take this deal [take it, good and hard].  Council says “thank you sir, may I have another??” and approves this unanimously.

May 29th, 2018: Unrelated item to enrage you – health insurance costs are set to increase nearly 7% for city employees (remember those awesome benefits!) which will cost the city nearly $80,000 this year since they spend over $1,000,000.00 per year on employee health coverage.  Finley states that this could be reduced if city employees are willing to pay a higher co-pay for prescriptions and he’ll go ask them!  BAHAHAHAHA.  Seriously??  In a shocking answer, city employees told him “no thanks, we don’t want to chip in any more for our gold-plated coverage…let the city eat it all”.  Christ.  Must be nice.

July 23, 2018: Monica finally officially brings this Azbell monstrosity to Council.  Why now?  I have no idea…the fix has been in forever, as I have documented.  She states “we have been working with Azbell since March 2017” [which is when they appeared in the minutes for the very first time] – the grand total is $94,674.57.  Talbert calls for a vote [apparently having absolutely no recollection that she herself already voted to award Broadcast Works the A/V contract back in August of 2014] and this ugly turd is passed.

Not a single peep from anyone present that this seems like a ludicrous amount of money to spend.  Nobody remembers the $34,000 bid for the same thing in 2014.  Did anyone even look at the bid sheet?  Four 70-inch LCD TVs for $2150 each is the VERY FIRST ITEM.  They cost $900 at Wal-Mart.  This is disgraceful.

News of this abortion is reported a few days later in The Lampasas Dispatch…whereupon The Original Lampasshole reads the article and blows a gasket…leading to this blog and the detective work you see on these pages.

Aug 13, 2018: Five days into a 120-day project, ASJ is already asking for another $10,800 for Old City Hall in Change Order #1.  Apparently a bathroom needed to be reconfigured, and “the price of metal went up” [you literally can’t make this stuff up].  Council, who is already committed to wasting $1.4 million dollars on this, isn’t going to let $10,800 stand in the way.  Change Order #1 is approved unanimously.

Sept 20, 2018: Forty-three days into project, we find out from Finley that “Council may recall approval of roofing repair to correct material failure and scupper height [no, I don’t remember this – never saw anything about it].  Based on non-performance of the selected contractor, Staff sought a quotation through the GC of the City Hall project.  Based on their inspection, roofing contractor would not guarantee the repair due to overlapping seam.  He recommended a complete re-roof of both roofs [the other roof is Municipal Court…why is this all lumped in together?  Two-for-one roof day?] at a cost of $45,194.

I’ll be charitable and assign only half of that $45,000 to the City Hall remodel – or another $23,000 for Change Order #2 – it is unclear if this has been approved by Council yet since the minutes are not posted for the last two meetings.

The weird thing about finding out the roof is crap and has to be COMPLETELY replaced, is that back in May 23, 2016, JNW  said the building “is in good condition” and then in October 2016, Finley handed JNW a check for $18,000 for “structural analysis and provide documentation” of the building.  Guess they don’t count the roof as an important part of the structure?  Beats me.  I’m not an architect or an engineer raking in huge fees.

November 16, 2018: Lampasas Dispatch reports another change order (#3) for ASJ Construction in the amount of $16,417.

I will keep you all up-to-date on the project as it limps along to completion.  Can’t wait to see what the next change order is!

The Twisted Logic of Councilman Mike White

During a 30 minute phone call (screaming match) with Mike White last month over the $100,000.00 Azbell Electronics debacle, other issues came up.  Like how overpaid our city employees are and how they seem to get an automatic raise every single year, when those of us in the private sector (who pay their bloated salaries) do not.

Now, before I begin shitting on heads, I’ll say I’ve always considered Mike to be one of the sane voices on city council.  He actually runs a successful business and understands the value of a dollar.  Thus, he is always voting NO to the plethora of moronic ideas coming out of that group.  Hopefully he will vote NO on the latest idiotic idea of a city recycling program, but I digress.

When I was bitching about the fact that we spend a LOT of money on a city manager AND and ASSISTANT city manager, he started laying into me that “we need to pay a lot because if we don’t, the city down the street will!!”.  I heard this same bullshit argument when I complained about the massive amount of money being spent on Christmas lights a few years ago.  The explanation I got was “they spend a lot more than that in Marble Falls!”

I don’t care what they spend on Christmas lights in Marble Falls.  Nor do I care what they pay their policemen or firemen or their city manager.  Lampasas is not Marble Falls.  Not even close.  So to justify bloated salaries because “Marble Falls does it,” is the height of idiocy.

The cost of living is much lower in Lampasas and the employment opportunities are much worse.  Ergo, you pay what you need to attract a person who can do the job – not what Marble Falls is paying for that job.

Here is your proof:

Cost of living and employment opportunities in Lampasas

versus

Cost of living and employment opportunities in Marble Falls

The average person in Lampasas earns about $27,000 per year and 21% of the city lives below the poverty line.  There is no excuse for paying city “workers” $70,000 or $100,000 per year.  Many of these “workers”, like Monica Wright, would be scanning groceries at HEB for $25,000 per year if she wasn’t “working” at city hall.

But wait!!  It gets worse!

Because when a city “worker” says they ‘only’ make $45,000 per year, they are conveniently leaving out all the benefits.  The city also pays their health insurance, which can be up to $15,000 per year.  They also put away another $15,000 or so for their pension!  So they are not costing the taxpayer $45,000 per year.  They are costing us more like $75,000 per year.  All to sit on ass in an air-conditioned office and tell people like me, by email, to buzz off when I ask too many questions.  Great work if you can find it! Who do I fellate for that job??

But that’s not enough.  They think they should get a 2% raise every single year.  This goes along with their overtime pay, “longevity pay” (yes, they get paid a bonus just for being there a long time), and weeks of paid vacation.  Add it all up, and a lot of these clowns are making over $50 for every hour of ‘work’ they spend dicking around on their computers.

*NOTE*:  All of the above guesstimates of employee cost are taken from the city budget.  Of course, they refuse to tell me what anybody actually makes so I have to deduce these numbers from the budget.  I DO know that a year or two ago, they wanted a 1% bonus, which a city council member said would cost the taxpayers another $60,000 – which means the city employee total employee salary number was somewhere in the area of $6,000,000.00 per year.  That’s SIX MILLION.  How many employees does that cover?  No idea.  They refuse to say.