skate park – The Original Lampasshole

No, The Skate Park Was NOT Built With “Private Funding” You Dunce

Well, with the annoying heat and drought, it was only a matter of time before the idea of a splash pad came up again.

Some locals were asking about it on Facebook this week. This topic came up about a year and a half ago as well:

I wrote about it at the time – where I pointed out that with the $971,000 that Misti Talbert pilfered from the City Covid gift, we could have built TWENTY splash pads. Alas, her idiotic Business Park STILL sits there…as empty as her skull:

I Think Misti Talbert Hates Children

But this week it came up yet again. Local dunce Jennifer Sanchez (Morono) was available to jump in and spout nonsense that was 100% wrong – as usual.

Oh, and she’s also whining about a big shade cloth again:

Umm, no sugar. The skate park was NOT “fundraised” with “private funding” – that was the nonsense they told us to get the ball rolling. In the end, Wings of Eagles raised about $5,000, maybe. The City paid close to $400,000 – so the “fundraising” part of it was about 1% of the total bill.

***Hostess House now $2.15 million, btw – 62% increase.***

Parks and Rec SHOULD ignore you. There is no way in hell the City is going to shell out ANOTHER $150,000 or so because you are too lazy to put on a hat or wear sunscreen. HEB won’t either. Money doesn’t grow on trees, dear. I know libtards like yourself THINK it does. But that is a falsehood.

Pool Packed On Summer Day. Skate Park Empty Again. UPDATE

Wednesday was a great day for the pool over at Hannah Springs. The skate park? Not so much.

So does “it’ll be used every single day” actually mean it’ll be used “every now and then…but not when it gets hot out”? Only Mike White knows for sure.

Maybe we should spend another $400,000 to put a big giant canopy over it. We wouldn’t want anyone living in Texas to get sun on their face. At least that’s how cretins like Jennifer Moron-o Sanchez think:

***We have shade at the parks. They are called “trees”***

[There is only one word in the English language I hate more than the word ‘kiddos’ – and that is the word ‘supper’. Is “kiddos” a Texas thing? I never really heard it before moving here 15 years ago.]

Maiden name Moreno and married name Sanchez…hmm. You’d think her kids would probably tan pretty easily. But no…let’s spend a big pile of money on an awning because you are too lazy or stupid to put on a baseball cap and some $8 sunscreen!

Luckily she is too ignorant to know about the existence of a “City Manager” and “City Council.” Probably too busy making sandwiches to learn those basics. We shouldn’t doubt her ability to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a canopy, though. Just look at her determination! She’s going to read an ENTIRE 30 MINUTES in a DAY for another cause!

Wow. Impressive.

I can’t help but wonder if that $400,000 spent on the skate park could have been better spent.

I know for a CERTAINTY that a splash pad (remember that idea?) would be a big hit. Too bad former mayor Misti Talbert pilfered almost a million dollars from the City to incinerate at her “Business Pork Project”…we could have built like 12 splash pads for that!

I’m sure it will be put to good use by Eco-Turd when they move in over there. Alan “I have a private jet” Champagne appreciated the donation from the taxpayers!

**UPDATED JUNE 9th**

ANOTHER beautiful summer day with ZERO skaters. Wow.

Bloom Off The Skate Park Rose Already?

Strange! I seem to remember Mike White telling City council that the skate park would be “used every single day” when the pro-skate-park people were making their case before City council! That was before the price jumped from $200,000 to $400,000, of course.

Maybe they’ll come out when the sun is down. Makes it easier to vandalize the bathrooms there, for sure!

It was worth it though. Just ask the 157 people on Lampasas County Breaking News who are going apeshit over their property taxes right now.

Oh, except for Bruce Haywood. He doesn’t pay any property taxes, remember.

Hey, at least the pool was packed. That would be the pool that almost didn’t open because Finley was too cheap to pay lifeguards a market-rate wage of $15 per hour. Hundreds of thousands for the skate park but nary a nickel for the pool. Wise indeed!!

Skate Park STILL Not Open!

First it was last fall. (in summer of 2022)

Then it was “early next year” (in fall of 2022)

Then it was February 15th (in early January)

Then it was “end of February” (in middle of February)

THEN it was “this Saturday” (March 4th)

But here we are at March 7th and it’s STILL not open!

**UPDATE** – Ryan Ward was on Lampasas Radio on March 8th and said that the NEW date is “in about two weeks” – which would be March 22nd.

[I love his weasel talk. I really do! He says stuff like “well, the skate park is basically done! Well, except for a little bit more grading and bringing some dirt in and cleaning everything up and removing all the equipment and kind of finishing everything out.” – LOL. That is most definitely NOT done!]

Over/under on the date of the first big injury out there that requires the EMT or fire truck to come out? I’m gonna say May 25th. I’ll make my over/under date on bathroom vandalism/destruction a little later at June 20th.

To my untrained eye, this hardly looks like a project that took well over two years and close to half a million bucks. But what do I know. Finley says it’s a good deal and Finley is NEVER wrong about these things.

He has made numerous other “good deals” like the Azbell A/V system deal and the Industrial Park deal, so who am I to question??

The Goldfish Swim Tonight: 1-9-23 Council Meeting

First council meeting of the year. I wanted to live-comment on this, but a biblical tantrum by our 8-year-old made that impossible.

What was covered:

Skate Park: this wildly over-budget project will soon be finished. Now council is trying to get ahead of the inevitable graffiti and vandalism problem. Guys like Mike White tried to tell us that these skaters are just average kids who want a place to skate. They aren’t hoodlums or anything.

Yeah, right. We’ll see in a big hurry. You can rest assured, I’ll document every penny spent on fixing that $180,000 bathroom that is adjacent to the skate park. Council is EVEN considering letting people paint all over this and calling it “art”.

No, I’m not kidding.

Harrison Construction received $27,500 for “skate park work” and another $7,220 for “road base” and “manufactured sand”. That would be “Harrison” as in “Greasy” Chris Harrison – former City council member who also works for S2M2 and connived the City out of $185,000 for the Brodie Estates subdivision – which is nowhere NEAR done yet.

Wastewater Interceptor project: I don’t care about this much. This is the kind of boring shit that City managers SHOULD spend their days doing – as opposed to crap like Business Parks and new council chambers projects. All I will point out here is that Pope Eckermann was paid $35,250 to do the study.

Another new police officer sworn in: how many is that now??? Jesus. Guess I better ask the City secretary.

Skate Park Approved…But At What Cost?

Yipee! Yay! They approved the skatepark! This will turn all kids in town into high-achieving children who never get into trouble or turn to drugs. They will develop confidence in themselves as they learn the half-pipe. They will all excel in school and master calculus at an early age! It is the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Tons of people from ALL AROUND will come here for the skate park and spend tons of money at restaurants and antique stores! It will even rake in more sales tax dollars than the giant metal LTX sign in the City square!!

Well, that’s what I hear on Facebook anyways.

What I DIDN’T hear on Facebook was the final cost of this debacle. As you recall, this thing went from $200,000 (yes it did, Finley!) to $300,000 to $470,000 over the course of 16 months.

A skatepark that is a great idea at $250,000 is a very stupid idea at $800,000, for instance.

It’s a shame that LEDC prez Misti Talbert stole that $971,000 from the City back in February, or we might not be worried about the cost of this.

Oh, and don’t forget that ACM Ryan Ward (who makes over $150,000 per year in salary and benefits) is banging the drum VERY loudly for huge raises for every government employee this year.…And he wants them NOW…like, starting next month! That’s a 3% hit now and a lot more later this year, during the budget process.

I wonder if his boss Finley deGraffenreid (salary and benefits of over $200,000) will get a raise too! The poor guy hasn’t gotten anything since that 15% increase (bi-weekly paycheck went from $5,000 to $5,769) he got in 2020 during the ‘pandemic’. You don’t REALLY expect him to survive on $12,500 every month, do you? (Plus free gas and phone and healthcare and 2-1 matching pension contributions by the taxpayer).

That’s the ‘pandemic’ where the government ruined the livelihoods of many, many people. I’ll bet you $100 that not a SINGLE CITY EMPLOYEE missed a SINGLE PAYCHECK during that entire year.

Any takers? That’s called “job security” and it’s something most gov employees take for granted.

Let’s take a look at his current paychecks, shall we?

Finley-Paychecks Download

No worries! Even though we are very likely entering a bad recession right now, they can just shake the money tree out back to pay for all this stuff.

Finley Tries To Copy Lampasshole Skatepark Timeline To Cover Ass. Omits Important Items.

Well, City manager Finley DeGraffenreid appears to be trying to cover his rear end with this skate park debacle. I went into a detailed timeline on this two weeks ago – and now it appears that Finley is (coincidentally!) trying to do the very same with his OWN timeline to try and explain the mess (see page 10 through 19).

The whole section is titled “Discussion regarding design, costs and progression of the Campbell Park Skatepark” – which would leave you to believe it was an explanation about how the skate park went wildly overbudget and is a year overdue. You’d be wrong, of course. That’s because despite the title, Finley spills a good 60% of his ink babbling about the Pavilion project – which is not what we are talking about, is it Finley?

No, we are talking about the skate park debacle.

This is a classic Finley move I have seen many times – he piles a bunch of other shit onto what is being talked about to obfuscate and confuse the issue. More than once, I have been handed 600 or 800 pages of bullshit (at 10 cents per page) I didn’t actually request from the City, and somewhere in that mess is the truth.

He posted 47 different timeline items (page 10 through 19). Of those 47 items, 27 of them make mention of the Pavilion Project, which is a completely different project – they just happen to be in the same general area of the City: Campbell Park.

Why throw in all that extra nonsense? That is what you do when you are a $200,000 per year bureaucrat who has to look busy, busy, busy.

In fact, I think part of the problem was these two SEPARATE projects got intertwined early on. I have no idea why except to maybe make things more complicated later. Clearly Finley can’t walk (pavilion) and chew gum (skate park) at the same time.

In fact, the geo-tech engineers (Langford at cost of $6,400) drilled TWO SEPARATE holes for the geo-tech report for TWO SEPARATE projects.

The very first timeline admissions Finley makes (July 13, 2020 – page 10) is: “skatepark and pavilion have been on the CIP (Capital Improvement Projects) since 2015…the last two years the estimated cost has been $350,000“

He is ALREADY lumping them together to cause confusion. What he SHOULD have said is “skate park $200,000 and pavilion $150,000”, which is what the estimates actually were.

[Ironically, a few builders in town told me they could have done that pavilion project for WAY under the $175,000 they ended up spending]

Here is proof of that…proof that Finley keeps denying and ignoring. He lied right to Cathy “Pork Chop” Kuehne’s face when she asked if the skate park estimate started at $200,000 and he said “no”:

City Manager Tells Blatant Lie To Council Without Blinking

So already, Finley’s OWN little timeline contradicts what he told council about the skate park NEVER being estimated at $200,000. It most certainly was. If the original skate park estimate was $300,000 (as he keeps falsely repeating), then that would mean the pavilion part HAD TO BE only estimated at $50,000 – because, as he just told us, the TWO projects combined estimate was at $350,000.

[Finley pulled this same stunt with the Old City Hall disaster. To this DAY he repeats the lie that it “only” cost $1.02 million when the true cost was around $1.5 million]

He also previously mentioned SPA Skateparks and Lamco as being the top two selected contractors. What he did again was fail to mention that one of those (Lamco) was selected for the pavilion. He was STILL lumping both of these projects together, which not only makes for confusion but makes it almost impossible to separate out the costs for each from his bureaucratic ramblings.

Both projects should have been discussed and priced SEPARATELY from the first day. They weren’t.

But the most damning omission from Finley’s little timeline is to ONCE AGAIN fail to mention New Line Skateparks and why they are involved at all, at this point. Not a SINGLE mention of them in his timeline.

SPA Skateparks was the company selected for this job by Finley himself [December 25, 2020] – NOT New Line Skateparks.

SPA Skateparks is:

“a turnkey, design build contractor of truly successful public spaces through the creation of world class skateparks. Our team of active skateboarders consists of registered landscape architects, engineers, professional skatepark designers, skatepark public planning consultants, skatepark construction managers and specialized skatepark construction crews who have been perfecting site integrated, poured in place concrete skate parks since 2006“

That is straight from the SPA website.

‘Turnkey’ means they do it all. Design, consult, construct….everything.

What SHOULD have happened, is that the City goes to SPA and says “we have $250,000 for a skate park – what can we get for that?”

This is how normal people in the real world operate. If you are in the market for a house, you figure out how much you have to spend, tell a realtor that and they find houses in your price range. Apparently that kind of common sense is absent in Finley’s office, as it is in Misti Talbert’s brain.

SPA has been doing this for 16 years. Don’t tell me that if the City came to them and said “show us our options for $250,000”, they don’t have about a dozen templates to offer up. Templates they have accumulated over the last 16 years of building parks.

Instead, we got a wildly convoluted timeline of delays, cost increases, dropped balls, designs that were never unveiled, and now this “New Line Skateparks” coming out of nowhere to take over the “design” of this thing.

Absolute train wreck. I guess we’ll hear Finley explain it all on Monday night.

Former Council Members Meddling in Current Affairs, Spewing Bullshit

Well, I tried to take a relaxing day with the kids and enjoy the water slides at Kalahari yesterday. It was all well and good until late evening when the Dispatch electronic issue dumped into my email box. I should have let it lie there until today, but I saw the front page with “skate park” and “historic buildings” and I foolishly opened it up.

What I found was quite disgusting and enraging. FORMER council member “Greasy” Chris Harrison and FORMER mayor “Transparency” Talbert yammering total nonsense about the skate park.

Why a has-been council member and failed mayor are involved in this at ALL is beyond me. Doesn’t Talbert have enough on her plate wasting money in her $7 million dollar sandbox over on Highway 183? I guess not.

The skate park is a disaster that has been out of control for a while. Even Cathy “Pork Chop” Kuehne (who is almost as profligate a spender as Talbert) finally asked “how did it jump like that?”

You KNOW it’s getting stupid when Pork Chop arises from her slumber and asks some obvious questions.

Ya’ll remember the skate park, right? That’s the one that went from a $200,000 estimate in August of 2020 to a $400,000 estimate in August of 2021 (page 20):

Then Finley stood before council and lied right to their faces about it all…

City Manager Tells Blatant Lie To Council Without Blinking

First up to explain this train wreck was former council member “Greasy” Chris Harrison. Harrison hasn’t been on City council for years, so I have no idea why he was wheeled in to bloviate on this topic in the first place.

Chris is the guy who, while running for re-election to City council said: “To me, it’s not the government’s place to fund private business”.

Then after he left office, he whored himself out to developer S2M2 Inc and went to his good buddy and former council chum Misti Talbert to grab $185,000 in taxpayers’ money to “fund a private business” that he now happened to work for and which wanted a free detention pond built. The very same detention pond that Misti and council had said “NO” to before Greasy got hired on to lobby for them:

City Hands Former Council Member “Greasy” Chris Harrison and Developer S2M2 $185,000 In City Funds For Brodie Estates

Anyways, I guess old Chris felt he owed a favor to Misti for getting him that big $185,000 check, so he was in the paper carrying water for her skate park disaster yesterday and trying to tell us why the costs exploded.

His brilliant answer?

Diesel.

Yeah, according to Chris: “Diesel went from $2 to $5.19”

This is complete horseshit, of course. Harrison is cherry-picking the dead-nut low price and the current ridiculous $5.19 price and blaming it all on that.

[Note: Waste Connections is a hell of a lot more “diesel sensitive” in the business of hauling garbage than the skate park is – and THEY are ‘only’ raising trash rates 8.8% – NOT doubling them. Hmmmmm]

The problem is that the original estimate was made in 2020 and the new “doubling of price” estimate was made the next year – LONG before diesel went parabolic.

Let’s see what diesel prices were in August of 2020 and then in August 2021 – which are the two dates the estimates were made (as you can see from City council’s own minutes):

We can see that diesel actually went from $2.37 to $3.45 during that time.

Harrison blaming the skate park cost doubling on diesel is like that moron Biden blaming high gas prices on Putin invading Ukraine. Sorry, but the damage was done LONG before all that.

Granted, that 45% increase sucks, but no way in hell that is to blame for a doubling of the skate park cost. I actually live in the real world and help run real businesses. The cost of everything has been screwing us too, but NOTHING has doubled in price in a year. We’ve had 15% increases, 25% increases and some 30% increases – but NOTHING has doubled.

The skate park fiasco is not due to “diesel”. The skate park fiasco is the result of YEARS AND YEARS of a culture of incompetence and unaccountability on the part of Finley deGraffenreid and City council. It is the result of a council that rubber-stamped any and all project cost increases with zero discussion or interest in knowing why.

It is also the result of a City council heavily populated by idiots like Chuck Williamson and Cathy Kuehne who have never worked in the private sector in their lives and do not value a tax dollar properly.

Their attitude for YEARS, no matter what the project cost overrun (and there have been MANY), was always “well, it’s just another [fill in amount], we can’t stop now”.

Over and over and over again, ridiculous bungling, cost overruns and fiscal waste were left unmentioned and unpunished. Everyone just went back to the Magic Money Tree to pay for all the stupidity. Wildly overpriced elevators, selling a building for $75k and buying it back for $225k, paying $96,000 for a $33,000 A/V system, not bothering to get bids on bathroom construction, etc, etc, etc. It has been going on for YEARS!

I can almost hear Talbert sitting in on this skate park discussion (where she had no business being in the first place – you are a FORMER council member, sugar) and blabbering something like “well, it’s only another $90,000 and we have to get this done”.

This is known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy and it is why the shitty Business Pork is STILL going strong and wasting $7 million over 20 years despite not a single prospect showing any interest in the damn thing.

Then our Parks Director made a ridiculous statement too! Here is what Chris Eicher had to say in the newspaper:

“We knew if we wanted a $300,000 skate park, we would have to budget $400,000. That’s just the way it is”

Huh? Ummm, no. If you know it’s going to be $400,000 then you SAY it’s going to be $400,000. Anything else is bordering on fraud as you give a bullshit low-ball number to get your project passed and then admit the “real” much-higher number later. I can’t believe he actually said that out loud. It reeks of dishonesty or incompetence, I’m not sure which.

The whole fiasco wouldn’t be complete without a zinger from Finley himself. Here is his brilliant addition to the anaylsis:

“The only thing I can guarantee is that the exact cost will be different than budgeted”

THAT is the wizard who is supposed to be on top of things and who costs the city around $200,000 per year for his “expertise”. For 25 years he has been working in the government sector doing this shit, but hey – don’t expect him to have a fucking clue either!

I pointed out the “Finley Factor” many years ago on these very pages. Finley is always off by a factor of 3x or so – and the price is ALWAYS higher.

Skate Park Cost Shoots Ever-Higher. Looks Like We May Get Ripped Off. Again.

When they first started selling us on the skate park, the estimated cost was around $200,000.

Pretty small potatoes, in the grand scheme of things – considering City council wasted over ONE POINT FIVE MILLION dollars (or almost EIGHT TIMES MORE) just to renovate the Old City Hall building that nobody (except City council and City employees) gets to use.

Then a year later in August 2021 (page 20), we were informed that actually, the cost will be more like $400,000 – a straight doubling of cost in one year.

NOW, hidden down on page 65 of the latest council packets, Finley informs us that “consultants estimated the increased cost of construction to be on the order of $170,000“.

By my math that makes it $570,000 for this thing – but the packet (page 69) tells us $470,000

Of course, that same page also tells us a lot of what ISN’T included and will be “done by others”:

So your guess is as good as mine but I’d say we are looking at WAY over a half-million bucks for sure. Sounds very expensive to me. I paid less than that for my house – and this is just a bunch of shaped concrete. According to the plans (page 69 again) the Lampasas skate park will be 5,000 square feet.

Let’s see what the experts say:

The average price to design and build a skatepark is from $40-$60 per square foot. Most projects cost around $50 per square foot in total. Skateparks rarely are more than $65 per square footand can sometimes be as low as $25 per square foot.

At the average cost of $50 per square foot:

A 3,000 square foot skate spot will be $150,000 and will support a few skaters at a time.
An 8,000 square footskatepark will be $400,000and will serve a neighborhood of about 25,000 residents.

So we’ll get 5,000 square feet instead of 8,000, it will cost about $100,000 more than the above assumptions, and Lampasas county has pretty close to 25,000 residents. It works out to about $100 per square foot – or double what the experts say is average.

All in all, it sounds like the kind of typical fucked-up, overpriced deal that TJ Monroe and Cathy Kuehne would slobber over and call “an excellent price” while a couple hundred grand of tax dollars disappear unaccounted for into thin air (see also: Campbell Park pre-fab bathroom, new City council chambers, Azbell A/V system, Business Pork Project, RKJ elevator, etc).

I also don’t hear a peep about “volunteers” or “fundraising” anymore. That charade has been dropped. This will come 100% out of the taxpayer’s hide. As usual.

I can GUARANTEE you that neither Kuehne nor Monroe (nor Williamson) has spent one second of their time Googling “skate park costs” over the last two years. This is all play money to them – especially Kuehne who is up for election next month.