Tag: hours worked

More LEDC Numbers Don’t Add Up…I Am Shocked

Every IRS filing for the Lampasas Economic Development Corporation has some numbers showing how many hours per week the officers ‘worked’. It looks something like this:

There are two problems with this. First of all, there are ZERO hours listed for “any hours for related organizations below dotted line”. I would think Talbert and Monroe would list their City council minutes below there, since their positions on City council are VERY closely related to the LEDC slush fund.

But even worse is the fact that the hours spent in LEDC meetings (according to their own minutes) do not even REMOTELY match the hours listed on their Form 990 submitted to the IRS.

They have all listed two hours PER WEEK on the IRS form (Millican and Lindeman list 1 hour only) – or 104 hours per YEAR conducting LEDC business.

The problem is, the LEDC minutes contradict this WILDLY. They are off by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.

Granted, the IRS filings show the fiscal year numbers (Oct 1 through Sep 30) and the minutes for the LEDC run from Jan 1 through Dec 31….but they both run for 12 months. Even though they do no overlap exactly, they show wildly divergent numbers.

For 2019 (using the LEDC’s own minutes), I show a grand total of 14.75 hours spent in meetings. Yes, you read that correctly. Just over ONE HOUR PER MONTH for an organization sucking down $300,000 of tax dollars per year. Your tax dollars hard at work!

Yup – they only met TEN times in 2019…for an average of 90 minutes each time.

Their IRS filings imply they worked 104 hours per year. Their own minutes indicate they met for 14.75 hours per year.

Now, you might say “well, they only MEET for 14.75 hours per year, but they take a lot of work home on the weekends”. LOL. Sure they do. If you believe that one, I have a Cajun restaurant on Key Avenue to sell you.

More to come…..

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?