Tag: pools

Dear Finley: You Are FULL OF CRAP [Part Three]

Now, where were we? Oh yes. We need to find $30,000 in the budget so we can pay a wage that attracts workers in a free market, open the pool and thus save the sanity of parents all over town. Original Lampasshole to the rescue once again.

FIRST: your admission prices are WAY too low. Bringing kids to the pool is essentially a substitute for babysitting. Parents who have been locked in with young kids for the last two months will appreciate this fact. I see admission is $2.50 for the entire day! According to the budget [page 6] you make about $40,000 per year in admissions revenue. You need to double the admission to $5 immediately…and ONLY Lampasas residents are allowed in the pool. Period.

BAM. I just doubled your revenue to $80,000. Maybe a bit less as some cheapskates will cry that $5 is too much to keep junior busy for hours and hours. Screw them – that’s a very fair price. It costs money to run a pool, and as far as I can see, the City ALREADY runs a deficit each year on Hanna pool of approximately $80,000 every single season [expenses of $150k versus revenue of $66k] . So users are ALREADY getting a deal. Anybody cries? Tell them to pound sand and explain that without raising wages there will be no pool at all. If you can pay $7 for a freaking Mojo coffee every morning, you can pay $5 to wear your kids out at the pool for three hours, moron. Don’t like it? Feel free to keep them at home all day and lose your sanity. I suspect they will shut up real quick and hand over a finski.

ALSO – your season pass pricing is VERY poorly structured…and based on “family” instead of “persons”. Forget $125 for a “family” – every hillbilly family with eight members within a half-mile of that pool will be subsidized by everyone else. Eight people take up way more room in a pool than three, yet you charge the same price. Totally idiotic. It should be $70 per person per year. Period. Drop the “per family” nonsense. If anybody whines about it, see above argument about pounding sand.

Secondly, your group pricing sucks. You only charge $75 per hour for private parties of 25 people?? Nonsense. Double that too. BAM – you just went from $8,000 per year to $16,000 per year in “rentals/parties” [page 6] revenue.

I just found $48,000 for you dummies in about 5 minutes – which is WAY more than you need. Ya’ll paying attention?? There’s more….

Thirdly, I hear from friends that there are anywhere from 8 to 10 lifeguards working in the pool AT THE SAME TIME!! Assuming this is accurate, that is ridiculous. Reduce that number! If there is some retarded Texas law about how many lifeguards per gallon of pool water or something, then go to the bare minimum. Eight or ten lifeguards in a pool that size is RIDICULOUS and unneeded. I used to lifeguard in an Olympic-sized pool with ONE other guy. We each had a side and were posted in the middle of the pool. Between us, we could reach anywhere in the pool in under 10 seconds.

BAM – just saved you another $10,000 assuming you can cut the work force by 10%. Pay more, get a higher-quality worker and jettison the useless turds. Leaner and meaner.

So….I basically just pulled $58,000 out of my Lampasshole in a few minutes. If that doesn’t spin your head, I have some other ideas:

  1. Reduce Mandy’s Walsh’s salary by $30,000. See if she sticks around for her Facebook Nerf job for a mere $71,000 in salary and benefits. My bet is she will.
  2. Knock $3,000 off the salaries of the 10 highest paid City Hall employees. Don’t worry – they won’t leave either.
  3. Take $30,000 from the LEDC. They skim over $300,000 PER YEAR from the tax payers with nothing to show for it but an empty ‘business park’ and a bunch of gay #LampasasRising posts. Mandy/City council had no trouble bending the rules and handing out $100,000 in FREE MONEY to over 50 businesses affected by the Wuhan Flu after about two minutes of discussion. They can cough up $30k for local kids to work the pool. Call it “economic development” of high school wages, ya dummy!

Hell, put the golf course guy Van Berry on this stuff. He’s the only one of you knuckleheads who has to deal with money coming IN as well as OUT. He runs a tight ship over there and understands getting fees to cover expenses. Then throw the guy a $5,000 bonus for fixing your mess.

Anything else you want to know? Go do it. Class is over.

Dear Finley: You Are FULL OF CRAP [Part Two]

When we last left off, we needed to solve this “lack of applicants problem” so we can open the pools this summer. How do we do that?

Immediately, we raise the offered wage to $10/hr, and we make a lot of noise about it. Then we wait and see what happens. While we wait, let’s think about how we will PAY for this increase in wages.

The latest budget shows $75,000 allocated for “seasonal salary” at Hanna pool [page 31]. If we raise wages roughly 40%, then that line item should rise roughly 40% – or about $30,000. Gee…where are we EVER going to find $30k in the $26 million City budget? I have lots of ways…but first, allow me to rip you clowns to shreds on your wasteful spending over just the last few years.

I would like to remind Finley and The Seven Goldfish of SOME of the many times the City has wasted WAY more than $30,000 in the blink of an eye:

The $96,000 A/V system for council chambers comes to mind. You had a bid from Broadcast Works for around $35,000. You instead went no-bid with Azbell and blew an extra $60,000 right there.

You also went with a $128,000 elevator (for City Hall remodel again!) when there was a $96,000 bid on the table from Austin Elevator. That’s ANOTHER $30,000.

You sold a building for $75k then bought it back for over $200k – City Hall building AGAIN. That’s over $125,000 squandered.

You incinerated almost $170,000 on a pre-fab BATHROOM in Campbell Park….yet another no-bid project that could have been done for half of that. That’s about $80,000 wasted.

Mike White managed to find about $72,000 instantly last month to provide “free” electricity to the businesses they forced closed due to Wuhan flu. Apparently there was just $72,000 laying around unused.

Rich developer Deorald Finney was handed “free” electrical hookups for this houses in Stone Valley a year or two ago – at a cost to the City of about $72,000 in lost fees.

S2M2 was handed $150,000 for THEIR housing development after FORMER CITY COUNCIL MEMBER “Greasy” Chris Harrison begged for it.

City council and the LEDC squandered $15,000 on three giant metal letters two months ago that will supposedly sit on a pedestal in the town square and attract throngs of tourists! Where is that thing, by the way??

Don’t even get me started on the MILLIONS wasted on the moronic “business park” – which I have covered here in great detail over the last 18 months.

Do you idiot hypocrites see a pattern here?? You waste HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS when it comes to buildings/toys for government workers and politicians. You hand out gobs of money to your rich developer buddies and former council members. You jump into NO-BID contracts all the time. YET, you can’t find $30k to pay a decent wage to LOCAL KIDS working at the pool!

Aren’t you dummies always crowing about “supporting the local community”? I know Mandy Walsh does it daily. I know council members like Delana Toups and Misti Talbert parrot that line all the time too. How about “supporting the local kids” and paying them a wage for lifeguarding that isn’t a complete insult?

You all make me sick with your hypocrisy, you absolute buffoons. Excuse me while I go puke. I’ll be back for PART THREE and how we pay for this paltry $30,000 in a $26 million dollar budget.

Dear Finley: You Are FULL OF CRAP! [Part One]

I forgot to mention in my City council meeting summary that one of the reasons they SUPPOSEDLY can’t open the pools this summer is that, gosh darn it, they just can’t find anyone to work there! Very few people are applying for the jobs!

So, I guess that’s it then! There was no discussion from City council on how to fix that. They just accept that line of manure and move on. Oh well.

I went and LOOKED at the job postings. Guess what? They are offering MINIMUM WAGE to lifeguards! You gotta be shitting me. Hey Finley – I was paid $9 an hour to lifeguard back in 1985. That’s about $25 in today’s dollars.

Ya think maybe offering dog shit wages to the local kids might have something to do with the lack of response? This is from the same guy who raised the “Economic Development Director” salary from around $42,000 to $71,000 a few years back EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD MULTIPLE PEOPLE APPLYING AND EAGER FOR THE JOB AT THE LOWER WAGE!! [This was during the Masonheimer years].

This has to be the most hypocritical bunch of stingy bastards on the planet. I don’t remember hearing ANY of this nonsense when it comes to “attracting the best” paper pushers and bureaucrats. They give every high-level, six-figure bureaucrat in City government raises constantly! “We need to offer attractive salaries or they will go somewhere else” – that’s the crap I hear from Finley every time I point out the ludicrous salaries of some paper pushers at City Hall (*cough* Monica Wright *cough*). There’s always plenty of money for raises for the $95,000 paper pusher. But not a cent for the lifeguards – you can suck on $7.25 an hour, chump!

Minimum wage for lifeguards! You really are a bunch of sorry morons, you know that? Maybe you should step out of your cushy, protected government Nerf jobs and go look at job listings around the area to get an idea of MARKET WAGES in the REAL WORLD. Kids can start at Whattaburger for more than that paltry wage, for crying out loud.

I’ll delve into the VERY EASY solution to your problem in the next post. It requires common sense and basic math skills. Yet another free service from The Original Lampasshole.

Council Meeting 5-11-20 – Recap

Wow – a long one and a doozy. I’ll summarize what I remember hearing yesterday on the recorded audio.

  1. Parking commercial vehicles on residential streets. Apparently there are “ten to twenty” tractor trailers and semis being parked overnight all over town. This discussion lasted WAY longer than it should have. It comes down to the safety issue (fire trucks can’t get through) and an annoyance issue (noise complaints at 3am from the neighbors). They talked about permits, but that seems like nonsense to me. So it’s ok to annoy everyone around you as long as the City gets their $200 permit fee? Fuggetaboutit.

There has to be a free-market solution in there somewhere. Talk to Wal-Mart or Stripes about parking there for a fee. One thing there is PLENTY of around here is open space. Hell, maybe talk to the LEDC! They have 165 acres of “shovel-ready business park” sitting there unused. I also see a TON of open space in the parking lots of all the schools that are sitting there unused. Have ’em park there and charge the truck owners $200 a month or something. Mike White was on the correct side of this argument. Should have been over in 10 minutes.

2. Mandy Walsh took credit for handing out free money (‘grants’) from the LEDC to around 50 lucky businesses. To hear her tell it, these business owners wept with joy and hugged her and she was their salvation since they didn’t know if they could open back up again until Mandy’s $1,500 saved them! [Yes, it sounds ridiculous to me, too]. Ten minutes ago, I officially requested a list from the LEDC of all businesses that received grant money (along with the amount given). Not that I don’t trust you, Mandy, but since it IS tax dollars being handed out, we need to make sure there was no cronyism and waste...which seem to abound when it comes to other LEDC projects.

3. The City is discussing NOT opening the public swimming pools for the summer. That is an outrage. This “social distancing” bullshit is like a religion all of a sudden, despite the fact that it is snake oil and not science (kinda like the plastic straw bans). You CANNOT social distance in a pool. Kids need to be kids. They need to roughhouse, pick boogers, dunk each other underwater, wrassle, and BE KIDS. Mike White was AGAIN the voice of reason on this issue, while the Speed Bump (Randy Clark) was for keeping them closed. Mike White said “it is not our job to enforce social distancing…everyone on the planet knows about Wuhan Flu now and they can make their own decisions. We have already taken so much away from these kids with the lock downs“. I am totally paraphrasing Mike there, but when he said it I was cheering in my car and yelling “f*ck yes, Mike!!!”. [I again reiterate that Mike White resigning from council is a huge blow. He is oftentimes the ONLY voice of reason and logic].

This “shut down the pools” is just another step in the pussification of America. If you are too much of a scared rabbit to go to the pool, then don’t go. Kids ESPECIALLY are at very low risk of dying from the Wuhan Flu. Let the parents make the decision to go or not to go. Christ, it’s just like the ridiculous peanut allergy nonsense where peanuts are banned from a school of 500 kids because one kid can’t handle peanuts.

The Wuhan Flu is going to be with us a LONG time – probably forever. And yes, some people are going to die from it. Get used to that. It is very unlikely there will be a vaccine any time soon. Quite frankly, I’d rather get out there and spread it around and get it over with. If you are morbidly obese or over 65 you may want to be a lot more careful, but for the rest of humanity, let’s get on with it already.

I’ll be VERY keen to see what happens with schools in the fall. I’ll tell you this: if you don’t re-open the schools you are going to have a LOT of VERY pissed-off parents. We all pay a LOT of taxes to run these schools and having the kids “learning by Internet” is not going to cut it. Parents are not going to shell out THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS in property taxes and then have their kids underfoot all day long screwing around on the Internet. No way. There will be pitchforks and torches.

So, since you know you are going to open the schools in the fall or face riots, you may as well start now and open the pools and let these kids mingle and spread all their germs around. You DO realize that’s how immune systems work, right?? They need germs to practice on, to quote George Carlin.

ODDS AND ENDS: Also in the meeting, we learned that March sales tax receipts were UP 11%, which blows me away. We were basically shut down the last 12 days of March, so to see sales tax UP 11% was a real shocker. So I guess Mike White is correct so far and it is Mike – 1 and Lampasshole – 0 on those predictions. I guess we will know more in one month when the April sales tax numbers come out. I have to assume a massive drop-off then. We shall see.

I leave you with the great George Carlin and his germ lessons from NINE YEARS AGO but absolutely accurate today – LOTS of bad words in here!!! The two-minute mark onward is especially relevant today: