Tag: LEDC waste

Comparing Salaries – Economic Director Edition.

We have looked at comparisons for City manager, ACM and police chief so far.

What is MOST hilarious to me about all this is that Ryan Ward’s “salary study” showed that HE was underpaid by 13% and the police chief was OVERPAID by 7.9% (this is before last year’s COLAs and raises were handed out). But from where I’m sitting, WARD looks to be overpaid far more (35%) than our police chief (maybe 15%).

Laughable!

Let’s move on to the next wildly-overpaid and underworked employee: Economic Development Director Stacey Ybarra.

If the 4% universal raise goes through, Ybarra will be pulling in $89,147. She has not even been with the City for a year and has no letters after her name. What she DOES have is a long history of non-private sector employment.

This comparison will be short, because to be honest – there aren’t many cities our size who even have a position for “Economic Development” on their payrolls!!

Burnet, TX: In 2020, they had a guy as “economic development director” who was pulling down $48,324. He either got canned or left. The NEW chick is making $61,534. Ybarra will be paid 45% more than her Burnet counterpart.

Liberty Hill, TX: $75,760 (population and growth rate FAR surpass Lampasas). Matt Powell was either canned or left last year and a NEW old fart has taken his place. She looks like a disaster waiting to happen – and a LOT of money will definitely be wasted in Liberty Hill. Ybarra will be paid 18% more than her Liberty Hill counterpart.

Serial grifter has jumped from government tit to government tit. This is like giving Janet Yoder Crazier a job as City planner. It will not end well.

The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure Ybarra actually LIVES in Liberty Hill! LOL. Either there or Cedar Park. I forget which. She lives closer to L.H. than to Lampasas.

Wait a sec…the Liberty Hill EDD looks EXACTLY like Jim Carey’s secretary in the movie Liar Liar!

Perryton, TX: $64,064 (population 8,150 – larger than Lampasas). Ybarra will be paid 39% more than her Perryton counterpart.

Now, some BIG cities (Austin, Dallas, Round Rock) have EDD positions and pay them ludicrous sums like $200,000 per year. We are not those cities. We are a small town of 7,500 which happens to sit at the intersection of three major highways. Every penny spent of “economic development” is a penny wasted. Just look at the still-empty Business Pork project.

Look How Much Money the LEDC Has Squandered Over The Last Six Years

Sickening.

That’s the only way to describe the utter waste of tax dollars called the “Lampasas Economic Development Corporation”. After seeing the latest figures (10/1/19 through 9/30/20), I decided to go over the previous five filings as well. The following totals are the amounts wasted by the LEDC in JUST the last six fiscal years (10/1/14 through 9/30/20):

INTEREST PAYMENTS: $327,173 That is money that goes straight into the pockets of the banks for the privilege of borrowing money to “improve” the ‘goat pasture’ (former councilman Mike White’s words, not mine) known as The Business Park. That is $327,173 in tax dollars that will not be used for parks, streets or swimming pools. It is gone forever. Misti Talbert and TJ Monroe (among others) are directly responsible for this.

LEGAL FEES: $93,237 How the LEDC managed to blow nearly a hundred grand on legal fees for a “business park” that has sat empty for 17 years is beyond my comprehension. Perhaps the idiots who run the LEDC can comprehend it (Talbert, Monroe, etc), but I cannot. Some lawyer out there has a nice new boat, no doubt. Citizens of Lampasas have nothing to show for it.

ADMIN/OVERHEAD: $72,000 The LEDC spend exactly $12,000 per year on administration/overhead. Year in and year out. It appears it is paid to the City – perhaps for consulting their accountants and wasting City time. But I really couldn’t tell you. More money vaporized.

ADVERTISING/PROMOTION: $31,389 The LEDC has somehow spent over $30,000 promoting and advertising their “business park”. What exactly are they advertising and promoting? A goat pasture (Mike White’s words, not mine) with tumbleweeds and cactus all over it? Whatever they spent it on, the ‘business park’ STILL sits empty after 17 years.

TRAVEL: $31,205 The LEDC has blown over $30,000 on “travel” over those six years. While $5,000 per year might not sound like a lot in the grand scheme of things, I have to wonder why it isn’t $0. Where exactly do these dunces need to travel to and why? What was gained by it? Clearly not any tenants for the goat pasture (Mike White’s words, not mine). Anyways, somebody got a lot of nice little useless junkets. The taxpayers got the bill.

FURTHERMORE – all this money is being thrown around with next to ZERO controls or oversight. I have covered repeatedly how Misti Talbert and TJ Monroe essentially oversaw their own activities by holding positions on the LEDC and City council (as MAYORS!) at the same time. It is a very incestuous and inbred group of dummies.

This group ALSO: (1) has no written whistleblower policies, (2) has no written conflict of interest policies and (2) has no written document retention and/or document destruction policy.

Add all that up? You have a small group of insulated, inbred, low-IQ people with next to zero oversight handling millions of tax dollars who are not accountable for their results. The predictable outcome is exactly the one that has been taking place over the last 17 years: millions of dollars wasted and nothing to show for it.

Disband the LEDC. Eliminate the Director of Economic Development position. Let the free market preside.

*UPDATE* – LEDC Loan Costs Now Much Higher For Taxpayer Thanks To Idiotic Extension Of Original Loan

So, I have the NEW amortization schedule in my hands, thanks to a very efficient City secretary.

As I stated before, the OLD loan only had about $133,000 remaining in interest payments over the next 9 years (total interest of $377,000 minus the $244,000 already paid over the last 6 years).

That is now out the window. The balance of the ORIGINAL loan ($885,652.00) will now be re-amortized at the old interest rate of 3.35% and extended another ten years – which will cost the taxpayers $340,882

So the LEDC went from only owing another $133k to now owing $340k in interest over the life of that $1.35 million dollar loan- thus fattening bank coffers by an additional roughly $207,000 in tax dollars.

Thus, that original loan for “pipes in the ground” of $1,340,000 will NOT cost the taxpayers $1,722,000 as originally stated back in 2015. It will now cost the taxpayers very close to $2 million total, after all is said and done.

Why would the LEDC just bend over and take it up the pipe like this? Why put the taxpayer on the hook for ANOTHER $207,000 in interest payments for no reason whatsoever?

Well, for starters, morons like TJ Monroe and Misti Talbert sit on the LEDC board. I mean, you couldn’t try to NEGOTIATE a bit? Maybe say “Hey, we agree to all your terms EXCEPT the loan extension – we don’t want to keep shelling out money for an extra TEN YEARS”.

Nah. Nobody negotiates anything when it comes to tax dollars. It’s all play money to imbeciles like TJ Monroe.

Let’s not forget that the NEW $1,500,000 loan from BancorpSouth will cost the taxpayers roughly $560,000 in interest payments over the life of THAT loan.

So we are now looking at $4,000,000.00 to get the ‘business’ park “shovel ready”, apparently, if you just look at the cost of those two loans taken out since 2015.

But there’s more!

Pope Eckermann himself guestimated the cost of Phase I Phase II to be around $1.9 million – with a 10% contingency thrown in there. Those numbers were arrived at in Jan 2020 (see page 4) – 18 months ago! I GUARANTEE you the new cost will be north of $2.3 million before all is said and done.

[** UPDATED Feb 2022: new cost was $2.75 million**]

Guys like Pope Eckermann are not stupid. Once the big $2 million dollar project is well underway, the LEDC and City council will not even blink at a few “cost increases” of $60,000 here and $86,000 there. That’s how these things work. He knows that morons like Chuck Williamson and Total Joke Monroe will fall victim to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, because they have done so repeatedly in the past.

So, the LEDC is on the hook for the difference between the loan amount of $1.5 million and the actual, final cost of construction – which could be $2.3 million or more.

If history is any guide, it will be more. Much more.

So that’s ANOTHER $800,000 thrown in for good measure. We’re at $4.8 million now.

The original cost of the 150 acres was $909,835 as well – back in October of 2003. Terms of THAT loan (see page 14) were to borrow $1.1 million for 15 years at 7% (later refinanced down to 4.95% but not sure when that happened).

Why borrow $1.1 million when the land cost $909,835? Well, probably for some pocket change!

THAT loan matured in November of 2019 and over the course of the loan, the LEDC paid approximately $460,000 in interest payments. So the land they bought for $909,835 ACTUALLY cost the taxpayers $1,560,000.00

Roughly $6.3 million is what this debacle will have cost the taxpayers by the year 2040, JUST from these loans. I have no doubt they will decide in ten more years that they need a Phase III or Phase IV.

I’d love to hear what City council thinks about this absolute waste of money. Not TJ Monroe, of course. I couldn’t care less what she thinks, as she has shown herself to be a fool over and over and she sits on the LEDC board.

Maybe the NEW council members could chime in on this at their next meeting.

Five Years Ago Today – City Council Pipe Dreams…

Exactly FIVE YEARS ago today, this appeared in the Lampasas Dispatch from former (thank goodness) council member Wanda Bierschwale referring to the STILL CURRENTLY EMPTY corpse repository ‘business park’ they have wasted millions of dollars on:

“The incumbent said the city acquired the business park property several years ago but has lacked the infrastructure needed at the site. Soon, she said, the business park will be developed enough to be inviting to businesses. [Then-council-member Wanda Bierschwale] – April 10, 2015

Soon, eh? Soon like, hell will freeze over soon? Or pigs will fly soon?

I bring these up to remind the unwashed masses that these clowns have no idea what they are talking about 95% of the time and their grand visions ALWAYS fall flat and cost WAY more than advertised. The same applies today.

Remember that when they babble about ‘developing the economy’ by flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet to people like Halff Associates and Pope Eckermann.