Tag: Martin's Rod

Industrial Park Joke Unravels Further – Literally and Ironically.

Another month….another year…and the joke that is the “Industrial Park” plan falls apart further. Literally!

Here is how it looked a year ago…

Food trucks! Vocational schools! Such hope! Such promise!

Such bullshit!

I took a dump all over this nonsense pipe dream many, many times…

My Drive Around Town Today: Brodie Estates and Industrial Park.

Yet here we are…another year passed. There is a grand total of ONE “RV” parked in the “RV and Boat Storage Business” as well as a bunch of junk prohibited by the agreement. But that’s not the funniest part.

The funniest part is that as of January 1, 2024 one entire banner is now gone and the other is falling down.

Gone are the phantom food trucks, the phantom dog park, the phantom mechanical vocational school! Of course, they are “gone” in the sense that none of that shit was ever going to happen anyways. Only taxpayer-funded imbeciles like Finley deGraffenreid and Stacey Ybarra ever believed this nonsense in the first place…which is why they wasted almost $40,000 clearing concrete at the demand of Martin himself.

Gone, too, is the phantom cigar lounge. Well, not really. They just decided to stick it in another place. INSIDE an existing business on the town square. LOL. Talk about a kick in the nuts. Of course, Finley’s nuts are likely very calloused at this point in his career after so many kicks to the ball sack – but the ridiculous $156,000 salary he makes annually surely constitutes a soothing balm for his abused gonads.

Then again, it’s the taxpayers who ACTUALLY get kicked in the nuts, since they pay for all this. Finley gets $156,000 to look like a chump but the taxpayer pays money for that honor.

The “master plan” from November 2021 LEDC minutes.

The next big date in the “Industrial Park Agreement” is only 29 short days away on February 1st!

At that time, they need to “approve and execute economic development agreement for the project with the City; and finalize sale, purchase and conveyance of Property at an agreed purchase price of $165,000″ 

Will they purchase the property as promised? If so, what the hell are they going to do with it? They already failed to perform Phase I with the big “RV and Boat Storage Business.”

Or will they decline to purchase the property, as I have predicted all along?

We’ll know soon enough.

Industrial Park “Contract” Still Being Ignored By Martin’s Rod & Custom.

This is what’s known as ‘leverage.”

As in, “the City has none and Martin’s Rod has it all”

The City is so desperate to get someone in there, they’ll allow complete and utter disregard for the basic rules of the contract they signed. You know, basically the ONLY two rules they had: only boats and RVs allowed to be stored there….NOT trailers.

Makes me wonder why they pay JC Brown thousands upon thousands of tax dollars to draw these agreements up when they are routinely ignored.

I mean, seriously…what is the City going to do? Tell them the deal is off? No way. They’ll sit there and get shit on repeatedly – anything to avoid admitting they can’t get the “Industrial Park” filled and looking foolish publicly.

The same thing will happen at the end of this year when S2M2 doesn’t have their 22 houses built at Brodie Estates. Will the City claw back the $185,000 in taxpayer money that Talbert so generously handed to a private business? Hell no. They’ll pretend it didn’t even happen.

Color me cynical, but I don’t see “Phase II” happening by June 20th when Phase I was a complete flop so far.

“Not Yet Finalized”

Memorandum:

For the 15th month straight, the agreement between the City of Lampasas and Martin’s Rod and Custom for the “Industrial Park” is “not yet finalized”.

It begs the age-old question: if an agreement sits on a desk forever and is never finalized, is it actually an agreement?

When does it cease to be an agreement-in-waiting and become another failed pipe dream of the LEDC? Will they ever admit the deal fell through or are they all running a secret pool to see how many months in a row I’ll ask for this fucking thing?

Anyways – looks like THAT was $38,000 wasted! Nobody knows how to piss money away like the City of Lampasas.

Is Finley Getting Nut-Punched Yet Again?

According to the City this week: “The Industrial Park agreement is still alive and should be finalized soon“.

My bad. I figured that after a year AND after the City agreed to blow around $40,000 removing old concrete to “make it more marketable” that the deal was dead. Maybe it still is, but something smells funny about “the agreement”….

That would be the “agreement” that was first mentioned in November of 2021 – a year ago. It has been “in the possession of Mr. Martin and his attorney” for QUITE a while now…

March 21, 2021: “No the agreement is not quite finalized.  It is under review by attorneys.  We anticipate it being completed soon.  I will get you a copy as soon as it has been finalized”  

April 13, 2022: “No the agreement is still being reviewed by his attorney.”

June 9th, 2022: “Staff actually followed up this week and it is still in the possession of Mr. Martin and his attorney.  We are hopeful that it will be finalized soon.”

I got the same answer in August and September.

[Apparently “soon” means the same thing here as it meant when City council assured us that “large companies” would soon move into the Business Park back in April of 2017.]

BUT here’s the rub: if the agreement has been sitting on the desk of and “in the possession” of Mr. Martin and his attorney for the last seven months, then why is the City suddenly unilaterally spending almost $40,000 to “make it more marketable”?

Or did we not get the entire truth? Is the truth maybe “Martin demanded we pay to have to concrete removed or he won’t go forward”? If that is the case, then THAT should have been mentioned at the City council meeting.

If that is the case, then the story about “making it more marketable” is bullshit. Then the truth would be that the “agreement” that has supposedly been in their possession and waiting for them to sign or not sign is ACTUALLY still an ongoing negotiation and the Martin side is squeezing the City’s nut sack – which has historically been the case.

It wouldn’t be the first time Finley’s nut sack was used as a punching bag.

So either the deal actually IS dead and they are lying about that – and the expenditure really IS to “make it more marketable” to some future as-of-yet-unknown tenant out there somewhere who might come along….

….OR (more likely) Martin demanded the concrete be removed (at great expense to the taxpayer) and the City lied and said they did it to “make it more marketable” – and conveniently omitted the part about who was actually demanding it be done.

One or the other has to be true.