Where to start with the utter lack of transparency on the part of the Lampasas Economic Dunces Club? Let’s look at their track record so far this year. Remember, this is a group that handles HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars annually and has wasted millions on a ‘business park’ boondoggle that has gone nowhere.
LEDC is supposed to meet once a month – on the third Wednesday. Meetings are supposed to be open to the public and minutes are supposed to be TAKEN AND POSTED so the taxpayers (the ones FINANCING these idiots) have a clue what is going on. Here is a list of the minutes for far for the year 2020:
Impressive! Here we are on April 19th – and FOUR meetings should be archived. Instead we have ONE from three months ago. How did this happen?
The February meeting DID take place, but apparently the minutes are off limits. I specifically asked the City secretary for a copy of those minutes and was told “the minutes of the February 19 [meeting] were not on the agenda, so the minutes were not considered and the reason they are not on the website“
So the minutes for the FEBRUARY 19th MEETING will not be posted until May 20th. Lovely.
They didn’t bother having a meeting in March. That is also typical. They usually skip one meeting a year, at the very least.
The April 15th meeting was (as always) held in the $1.5 million Jack Calvert Fishbowl Vanity Project. That is the SAME place City council holds their meetings and live-streams to the citizens. It was not open to the public, but the LEDC couldn’t be bothered to use the $96,000 A/V system there to stream or at LEAST record audio like City council does. Instead, these dummies decided the citizens would have to go through the arduous process of registering to view the meeting on Zoom – a very well-known piece of junk that only a dunce would sign up for.
Incredible: the City ALREADY PAID FOR a $96,000 A/V system to record audio and video of meetings….but the LEDC can’t be bothered with that. Instead they want the taxpayers to dick around with a third-party, piece of crap teleconferencing site. There is absolutely no reason for this. I asked Finley two months ago during our face-to-face why the LEDC doesn’t use the $96,000 A/V system that is sitting right there in the meeting room. He had no answer. He didn’t know.
I was also told point-blank by the City secretary that “there is no recording” of the April meeting. Lovely again! I sure hope somebody at least took some minutes. Otherwise, they might be in violation of their charter.
So, we have ZERO idea what is going on with the LEDC as they prepare to hand out $3,000 checks to random businesses in town to “help them out” of the Chinese virus mess [page 3 agenda].
Luckily, LEDC will be having a meeting with City council on Monday the 20th (tomorrow) and that WILL be live-streamed and recorded. Nice of somebody to let the taxpayers know what is going on. But if you ask me, having Mandy Walsh and other City employees and bureaucrats in charge of handing out tens of thousands of tax dollars to random businesses is a recipe for disaster.
Also: “The LEDC review committee is the sole and final authority in determining eligibility for funding.“[page 5] LOL. Gotta love it. I’m wondering if there will be PUBLIC RECORDS of WHO gets HOW MUCH money. There better damn well be, or this is just a random and arbitrary slush fund run by City bozos and bureaucrats.
I’m also wondering if handing out $3,000 checks to businesses of THEIR arbitrary choosing is even legal. They claim “authority of the EDC under Sec. 505.103, Texas Local Government Code” [page 5]. So, of course I went and looked that up. Here it is:
First of all, how is this ‘promotional purposes’? It’s a giveaway, plain and simple. Secondly, if I am not mistaken, the LEDC skims about $300,000 in sales tax revenue per year for their little slush fund – so that would mean a max payout of $30,000 for this little program….or ten whole businesses.
Wonder how they will pick those ten lucky recipients out of hundreds. Will people who were nice to Mandy get first dibs? Maybe someone on the LEDC has a brother-in-law and HE will get first dibs. Who knows. All the more reason to drop this idea and simply disband the entire silly LEDC and let people KEEP WHAT THEY EARN themselves instead of begging City bureaucrats for some crumbs back.