morons – The Original Lampasshole

Old City Hall 2.0: Hostess House Costs EXPLODE To $1.88 Million! Up 44% From Last Estimate!!

Hey, what’s another$570,000between friends??

These people are insane.

I warned you! I warned you over and over and over. I laughed when the Hostess House “minor repairs” were first talked about….

That was exactly three years ago. Just some “minor repairs” and “minor decorations”. Yeah, sure. I called bullshit. I reminded you of the Old City Hall debacle and the $1.6 million spent on that vanity project (soon to be $1.85 million) – a pet project of Misti Talbert’s.

THEN it jumped up to “about $200,000”, according to City Manager Finley deGraffenreid in the Lampasas Dispatch in March 2021 – a mere 18 months ago:

*Maybe Finley can stand up there and tell us how he never said this…kinda like the skate park lies.*

Council picks architecture firm for Hostess House upgrades

THEN it ballooned to $1,308,670 – which is a sick joke all by itself. Morons like Cathy Kuehne said they should keep the historical look “even if it costs more”. Why not? It’s not her money! It’s just play money, apparently!

But I knew from years of watching these clowns that it wouldn’t stop at $1.3 million. No way. As of today, the costs have exploded once again…as they ALWAYS DO. That’s what happens when chimpanzees get ahold of somebody else’s checkbook.

The NEW estimate is $1,879,483.55 [see page 67]

Almost TWO MILLION DOLLARS for an “event venue” that will bring in just $10,000 per year, by the City’s own admission. So it’ll only take about TWO CENTURIES to get your money back.

Why the massive increase? Well, inflation of course! Yes, we all know inflation is running at about 44% per year.

So the consulting and engineering firms – who were paid HUGE amounts of money [$130,570 to Reliance Architecture in Oct of 2021] to plan all this – are just NOW realizing “oh wait! We need a fire alarm system! We need a sprinkler system! Oh, and a grease trap and exit stairs!”

Bullshit. They are either monumentally incompetent or this is some kind of kickback scam. There is no way they are that stupid.

[I seem to remember the EXACT SAME THING happening with the Old City Hall remodel back in March 2015 – except THAT time it was JNW Architects that was getting big checks to screw the pooch. Hmmm…wonder why Finley didn’t go with JNW again THIS time?]

Oh, and also “scope creep” – which is a fancy way of saying “we just keep adding shit and agreeing to more because – once again – it isn’t OUR money“. – ALSO known as “change orders”, which is how these contractors fleece their customers. Oldest trick in the book.

Christ, TJ Monroe is making Misti Talbert and her Old City Hall debacle look like a penny-pinching Jew with this outlandish waste of money.

This is EXACTLY like the Old City Hall debacle a few years ago. A bunch of children acting like it’s Christmas and Santa will give them everything they want. A $59,000.00 canopy? Yeah, why not. A pool changing room for $49,000? Hell yeah – that is obviously a necessity we can’t do without. Some random vague bullshit like “expanded renovation” and “technology” for an additional quarter of a MILLION bucks? Yes please!

Any City council member who votes to approve this shit should be voted out of office when they are up for election next time. This is absolutely disgusting. I can’t believe they are even bringing this up publicly for discussion. I’d be ashamed to bungle things up this badly and ask for a 44% increase in the money wasted on this idiotic project.

Ukrainian Prez (The One Having His Balls Washed By Liberals) Rents His $4M Italian Villa to….Russians!

Gee, who woulda thunk it? Ukraine is known for serious corruption – something everyone forgot earlier this year when they rushed to put idiotic Ukrainian flags on their Facebook profile pics. I knew which side I was on right away when two of the dumbest people I know of – Clayton Tucker and Potato Head Steph Fitzharris – swapped their “I got vaxxed!” profile templates to Ukrainian flags. They swapped one virtue signal for an incorrect/losing cause for another.

If you are REALLY a King Moron like Clayton Tucker, you even hang a Ukrainian flag on your mommy’s garage where you live…

Disgusting commie scum.

Turns out Zelensky has even MORE luxurious homes besides his $30 million Miami mansion. He has another in Italy – which he is renting to….Russians.

You can’t make this shit up.

You wonder why libtards AND Rinos are falling over each other to send $80 billion of YOUR tax dollars to this crook? You wonder why establishment shitbag politicians went crazy when the ONE honest man in D.C. (Rand Paul) said “hey, we should maybe have some oversight on these billions of dollars”?

Because half of these billions are no-doubt being funneled to scumbags like Biden, Pelosi, McConnel, Schumer and the other fossils who have corruption down to a T after all these decades.

Dumb liberals – fooled yet again.

***More lies and propaganda – swallowed whole by morons***

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…..

OUTRAGEOUS Tidbits From LEDC Non-Profit Filings

We will be doing a DEEP dive on the Lampasas Economic Development Corporation for the next few posts. I have been reviewing ALL of their 501(c)(3) tax filings since inception in 2000. Nearly TWENTY years of shenanigans and obscene money wasting.

Lets start with how much money the LEDC have skimmed off of productive citizens. Their main source of “revenue” is sales tax. Since their formation in the year 2000 through Sept 2018 (the last Form 990 available online) they have skimmed $3,796,974 for this ridiculous slush fund.

Seeing as how the amount of sales tax skimmed has increased every single year for the last 17 years (except 2009), I think it is safe to assume it increased for the 2018/2019 tax year as well. Which means we can safely tack another $300,000 onto that total.

**UPDATED 6/9/21** – Income for 2019 filing was $313,229

Yes, the LEDC is now skimming ~~about~~ OVER $300,000 PER YEAR in sales tax revenue to run their little slush fund.

Let’s call it a nice even FOUR POINT ONE MILLION DOLLARS skimmed.

They purchased their ‘Business Park’ land on Oct 1, 2003 according to the records….for $909,835. They carried it on their books at that exact price until it was marked down on their 2013 tax filings to $817,978 (Schedule D Part VI).

The sudden change fits my other info: that the LEDC paid Herbst Real Estate to do an appraisal in 2012. So it makes sense this new value shows up in the filing date ending Sept 2013.

Only a group of clowns like this could buy land for $909,835 and have it worth 10% LESS ten years later. Did they think to have it appraised BEFORE they bought it? I’d love to know who sold these chumps the land.

The most disturbing and disgusting part about the $4.1 million being skimmed over the last 19 years is that their controls are nonexistent. Their tax filings SPECIFICALLY ask “Does the organization have any ‘conflict of interest’ policy?” – and the LEDC answers NO every year [Part VI section B, 12a].

That means that officers, directors, trustees and key employees are NOT required to disclose interests that could give rise to conflicts.

They also answered NO to “does the organization have and written document retention and destruction policy”.

Pathetic.

Know what else? They immediately spent $43,429 on ‘engineering and surveying’ in 2004 – right after buying the property [Schedule A – part VII]. Wonder who got THAT chunk of cash. Remember, that is 2004 dollars…which is equivalent to $59,000 in today’s dollars.

Kind of makes you wonder why, after $59,000 of surveying, they had to hand Pope Eckermann $168,740 AGAIN between 2014 and 2016. How many times can you engineer/survey the same piece of land??

Look at the other GOBS of money flushed down the toilet: $24,000 on ‘admin and overhead’, $23,408 on ‘miscellaneous’, $20,900 on ‘other services’, $34,240 on ‘professional services’. WTF???? $146,913 vaporized in the blink of an eye! [$200,000 in today’s dollars]

Then let’s get into the LEGAL fees they have wasted…..they blew over FIFTY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS in 2003 and 2004 alone ($69,000 in today’s dollars!). I’m assuming related to the purchase of the land? What else could it be? Who knows but that is an insane amount of legal fees.

[More coming soon as this is a huge amount of work to dig all these out of the archives]

LEDC Hands Another $100,000 From “Business Park” Slush Fund to Pope Eckermann

Another ritualistic tithe has been handed to Pope Eckermann The Engineer – this time by the Lampasas Economic Development Corp. The LEDC is a non-profit group that takes large piles of tax money and sets them on fire in various imaginative ways – all in the name of “developing the Lampasas economy”.

This ritualistic destruction of tax money is performed by some of the same people who squander tax dollars over at City Council: Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert and TJ “No Insulting Nickname Yet” Monroe.

Some of the ways they have torched taxpayer money in the past include $8,000 to ‘develop an LEDC website’ and then directly handing Monica Wright $6,000 per year AND handing CivicPlus $1,575 per year to ‘manage’ said website, $767,768.00 (years ago) to Qro-Mex to run a water/waste water line to the still-non-existent “business park” which sits there as a 165-acre weed patch, $230,000.00 to run electricity to the same weed patch, close to $100,000 per year to the LEDC Director to, well, direct stuff (and go to countless useless conventions like TML, Save Your Town, Stand Up Rural America, plus workshops, round tables, brain storming and years of wasted time before finally deciding to pay Halff Associates $120,000 to just do the job for them) …..plus many, many, many thousands of dollars to repeatedly produce videos to “promote Lampasas” which are placed on YouTube, viewed 403 times by the LEDC and city employees and then promptly forgotten.

That’s just a taste of the waste.

But now, apparently in order to “do SOMETHING” on the 165-acre weed patch (after spinning their wheels for 7 years) and to throw good money after bad, the LEDC has decided to hand Pope Eckermann The Engineer $100,000 to “develop PART of the business park”. This is a STEAL compared to the $125,000 Pope Eckermann originally tried to squeeze out of the LEDC just a month earlier.

This bizarre compulsion to throw money at Pope Eckermann makes me wonder if he has compromising photos of members of LEDC and City Council. It simply boggles the mind.

What do we get for this six-figure payoff to the Pope? Topics of discussion included: project management (nice and vague), drainage analysis, the ever-present “geotech report”, fee schedule (?), project limits (??), bid phase services (???), approvals and permits, construction documents and a bunch of other buzz words that sound like about $8,000 of real work to an honest-working rube like myself who possesses no compromising photos of anybody, unfortunately.

We will delve into detailed history of LEDC money wasting soon – mainly focusing on this disastrous ‘business park” debacle.

Mayor Talbert City Hall Vanity Project Delayed Yet Again – Due to Overpriced Elevator

Wow. What a difference a week makes!

Just a 14 days ago, Finley assured City Council that the elevator for the City Hall Boondoggle would “arrive in mid-March” and take a week or two to install.

Not anymore.

NOW, according to Finley and city council packets, “production for elevator equipment has been pushed back two to three weeks”. Seriously?!?!? The arrival time is now “projected for the first or second week of April…and crews will take approximately two to three weeks to install.”

You will recall, back on November 14th, 2016…City Council approved an elevator bid from RKJ Construction for $119,532…and which later ballooned to over $125,000 – despite that fact that Austin Elevator bid $96,600 for the exact same job. Former city council genius Chris Harrison made a motion to accept the inflated elevator cost because “[RKJ] is local”

Let’s all take a moment to thank our stars that Harrison is a FORMER council member now.

Production?? WTF? Are they JUST NOW building an elevator for the Lampasas-Misty-Talbert-Finley-DeGraffenreid-“WOW Factor” $1,500,000 City Hall Boondoggle which has been in the works for years? How is that possible??

So, despite paying an extra $30,000 for an elevator to “keep it local”, and despite the fact it was bid on OVER TWO YEARS AGO, it is STILL not ready! What?? You’re telling me it is being specially constructed as we speak? Last I checked, an elevator is a simple box and was invented a century ago, at the least. What is the hold up? Once again – you can blame former genius Councilman Chris Harrison for this one – he made the motion to piss away an extra $30k for a local elevator – and council rubber-stamped it unanimously…as usual.

Just another delay and cost-overrun for the bloated and ridiculous City Hall “WOW Factor” renovation which is the centerpiece of the Talbert Administration. I’m seriously shocked she is running again after this debacle. I’d go hide my head in the sand, if I were her.