Remember when Misti sat there in a council meeting and blathered about how the City should be ALL about transparency for the citizens and taxpayers? HERE IS THE LINK and below is the quote:
“I feel like (City) staff and Council oughta be tasked with being accountable to answer on the spot…and..uh…I would be comfortable doing that….that’s transparency at its finest…is…you know…we don’t put off a question, we answer it on the spot”
You can listen for yourself at the 1:27:10 mark.
Well, Misti Talbert is a bald-faced liar. This is the SECOND time this year the City has refused me transparency on expenditure of City funds and instead hidden behind their overpriced lawyer, Jo-Christy Brown. [The first one is LINKED HERE].
So what is it this time? Why is the City AGAIN paying Jo-Christy Brown gobs of tax dollars to tell me to pound sand?
Well, it has to do with the ill-fated ‘business park’ and their attempts to get someone – anyone! – into that ‘park’ to show it isn’t a complete disaster and financial train wreck.
Enter Mike Cour of Eco-Strong. I have already gone into GREAT detail in a four-part series about why I think Mike Cour is a charlatan and slime ball offering nothing of value to the City. The first part of the series can be found below:
Somebody Has Some ‘Splaining To Do Regarding Eco-Strong, Mike Cour and the ‘Business’ Park Money Pit
So….Mandy Walsh and the LEDC are pinning their hopes on this Mike Cour idiot, but they need to somehow prove he’s the real deal – and they need to do this fast because they have the Langford Community Management Services people waiting on that information so they can file their grant application. The same application where Mandy and the LEDC tell a whopper of a lie that the City was “economically injured”, nay, devastated by the Wuhan Flu and deserve this million bucks from Uncle Sugar to paper over 15 years of fiscal mismanagement.
How to do this? How to prove that Eco-Strong is ‘legit’? Especially in light of my damning, deep-dive expose on Mike Cour and Eco-Strong?
Why, you pay up AGAIN and hire a supposedly independent “third party” to “analyze” Mike Cour and his pile of feces to see if you can polish it up. This third party is Impact DataSource…and their main business seems to be (in my opinion!) taking big checks from government to give an official-sounding ‘seal of approval’ to garbage businesses like Mike Cour and Eco-Strong. To polish the Eco-Turd, as it were.
Impact DataSource charged the City a $950 fee to “analyze” Eco-Turd and thus expunge its stench – giving it a false patina of reputability, in my opinion. Impact DataSource is supposed to polish Eco-Turd up nice and clean so it can be inserted into Langford Community Management Services CARES ACT grant – for which they are charging the City $7,500 and which was SUPPOSED to be submitted back on July 31st!!!
I have been requesting this impact report every single week for the last 3.5 months, hoping to catch it as soon as it was finished. Every single week, they tell me “there are no responsive documents to your request”. In other words, the study STILL wasn’t completed.
That all changed this week. Instead of telling me “no responsive documents”, they made me wait a full week and then have JC Brown send me this utter tripe about “proprietary information” as she kicked it up to the Texas State Attorney General to see if he agrees. This will take 30 days, of course.
Seems to me that if the City was as transparent as Misti pretends it to be, a simple photocopy of the “impact study” could be produced in a about 5 minutes and handed to me for the usual 10 cents a page.
But no. The City is ONCE AGAIN spending piles of money and refusing to disclose details. Luckily, one of the larger idiots on City council is now gone (Chuck Williamson) and another new member – Bob Goodart – has already made it very clear to me he thinks the ‘business’ park is a colossal waste of money.
Guess it’s time to call my lawyers AND Mr Goodart to get some answers from a very unwilling LEDC.
Stay tuned….