TSM Consulting – The Original Lampasshole

Was Lampasas’ Inept IT Department Hit by Computer Malware Attack?

Hmmmmmm…..last week I saw an article claiming many cities in Texas were hit by malware attacks. I immediately thought to myself “Lampasas better hope they weren’t one of them, because our IT “experts” are anything but”. Of course, Texas is a huge state with thousands of cities…I figured the odds were highly against it and forgot about the whole thing.

THEN, yesterday and today, I read Facebook posts about computers being down for people trying to pay their utilities here in town since last Friday (see: Lampasas County Breaking News).

Could these two things be related?? Did Lampasas fall victim to a computer malware attack?? This is all total speculation on my part, but it would be quite fitting if the TWO unqualified IT “experts” on the bloated payroll (who I have been railing against for over a year now) left the front door wide open for a cyber attack. Quite fitting indeed.

If so, I would love to be a fly on the wall as Monica Can’t-Wright and her sidekick, Kristy “The Joker” Acevedo run around like headless chickens frantically dialing TSM Consulting to ride to the rescue and fix it all for an exorbitant sum.

How Many Hours They Actually Put In

Since I started this whole journey with the Azbell Electronics no-bid $94,000 “Ferrari of A/V systems” contract in the IT Department, I thought it fitting to start there when it comes to ACTUAL hours worked.

After requesting a “payroll history report” for a certain IT Department head, I came up with the following. Remember, there are 26 pay periods of 80 hours each (40 hours per week for two weeks). Fifty-two weeks times 40 hours yields 2080 hours as the maximum. Of course, very few people work a 40 hour week for all 52 weeks of the year (except tons of small-business owners, but whatever).

We’ll assume two weeks vacation and some sick days thrown in there. So the normal private-sector worker probably works about 1950 hours per year, maybe. Here are the number of hours worked per year for the IT Department head:

2013 1827.5 hours (equivalent to over 6 weeks vacation)

2014 1798.5 hours (equivalent to over 7 weeks vacation)

2015 1730.5 hours (equivalent to 8.7 weeks vacation – well over 2 months)

2016 1711.5 hours (equivalent to 9.2 weeks vacation – 2 months plus a week)

2017 1736.5 hours (equivalent to 8.5 weeks vacation – two months)

2018 1725 hours (equivalent to 8.8 weeks vacation – well over two months)

So over just those 6 years, we see about 48 weeks off of work – or nearly a year! Work 5 full years – take almost a year off….fully paid, of course.

Or put differently, if an employee costs the taxpayer $110,000 per year but only puts in 1725 hours of “work”, it is costing the taxpayer almost $64 per hour of “work”.

This also doesn’t take into account the $1800 per month the City pays TSM Consulting to be on call for all the network issues that TWO City IT employees aren’t capable of doing. Nor does it count the thousands of dollars to Cardinal Tracking Inc. or random guys named Neil Cardwell. Nor does it count all the other chunks of money like the “appreciation pay” she gets at Christmas or the “longevity pay” she gets for X number of years polishing a seat with her rear end.

So not only is the pay FAR higher than the private sector…the hours are far less too! Gotta love it. The question remains: will Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert have the guts to freeze or even cut salaries this year? Or will they do what they always do…spend, spend, spend?

City Paying Three Times To Do One IT Job

I’m sure you have all gotten your property tax bills by now! Happy? You’ll be REALLY happy when you read yet another chapter of waste in the IT Department!

I just love picking up stacks of records from City Hall. Love it. It’s like Christmas in October. Today, I was handed a nice big pile of copies (for only $151.60) pertaining to IT Department expenses under the heading “Professional Services” [budget line 505-5395]. As I have pointed out recently, in addition to our two highly paid IT ‘experts’, the IT department farms out a lot of work to “professionals” who then do the work that our ‘experts’ are unable or unwilling to do. One of these “Professional Services” is TSM Consulting….and boy, do they make some easy money!

I was hoping that these copies of the TSM bills would provide SOME KIND of description of what EXACTLY the city is getting for their $1,800 per month. Nope. Nearly every single page looks like this:

Just month, after month, after month (for YEARS) of shelling out $1,800 to TSM Consulting…for “monthly network support”. All initialed and approved by “MW”…seriously?? Her “Network Administrator” is supposed to be doing that stuff – it says so right in her job description:

Of course, neither our IT Director NOR our Network Administrator has a single certification from Cisco or Microsoft. Most “experts” have their CCENT or CCNA or CCNP certifications. Not our well-paid experts. And why should they? Just sit back and have the ~~suckers~~ taxpayers pay TSM Consulting $1,800 a month instead! Presto! The city is paying three people to do one job! And you wonder why your taxes go up every year. Incredible. Monica has been there THIRTEEN YEARS and does not posses an entry-level network certification. Nor does her underling Kristy Acevedo.

Even worse, it appears that TSM Consulting gets paid $1,800 per month just to be on-call in case of a problem. So they get paid to do nothing most of the time. How do I know this? Well, buried away in my pile of Christmas gifts was this – a nice double billing for Feb 29, 2016:

Yes, that’s right – in addition to the ‘normal’ $1,800 in free money paid to TSM in February 2016, it appears there was actually something for them to do. Namely “remote support setup, network mapping, and internet and firewall troubleshooting” – and for THAT, we paid ANOTHER $2,000 on top of the $1,800 retainer! Are you kidding me?? It also doesn’t even state how much time they spent on it! Just “quantity 1” and “rate $2,000”. Would be nice to see how many hours they actually spent on this. Incredible! Nobody knows how to burn money like the IT Department.

Worse yet, TSM isn’t the only one getting paid to do our IT Department’s jobs for them…CivicPlus, Cardinal Tracking and even some dude named Neil Cardwell are all on record as sending bills for IT work to “MW” over the years. Here’s another one:

Server migration is just moving data from one server to another. Kind of like I move damning financial photos from my phone to this blog – little did I know that was worth $150 an hour. MW and her entire IT “department” didn’t know how to move data from one server to another?? Mind-boggling.

So, it appears the job description for IT Director is

Show up to the office…post some Facebook crap on personal page
Find a consultant to do anything harder than change a printer cartridge
Sign “MW” after job is complete (complain during 2-hour lunch that you have hand cramps)
Take three weeks paid vacation.
Drive to Dallas. Look at their City Council chambers. Drive home.
Go to a couple of City Council meetings and pick the “monthly website photo contest” winner. Bat eyelashes at City Council.
Throw away the competitive $34,000 A/V system bid. Replace with $100,000 A/V system.
Make sure you take all 10 sick days….you earned it. Kinda.
Collect fat check and year end “appreciation pay” from Finley, as soon as he takes break from setting $1,500,000.00 on fire over at Old City Hall.
Annual get together with Finley, Gary and Kristy…create $500,000 money pile and jump around in it while laughing heartily at ~~suckers~~ taxpayers.
Repeat for a few more years and then collect fat pension

Must be sweet! Good thing there are thousands of ~~suckers~~ citizens out there paying that property tax bill every November!

New Fiscal Year Begins – Finley and Crew Get a Big Raise!

The new budget was finally posted…and the higher-ups at City Hall got an early Christmas present! Salary and benefits for City Manager Finley deGraffenreid and his assistant jumped almost 9% over last year. That line item went from $296,000 per year up to $322,000 per year – totaling over $300,000 for the first time ever. [For comparison, 10 years ago it cost $124,000 to “manage the city”. So it appears to go up 10% a year without fail] There were 54 resumes submitted for that Assistant City Manager job when it was created last year….now we know why!

The IT Department jumped a smaller amount…but don’t worry, they aren’t going to go hungry. IT Director and her one-woman “department”, consisting of Kristy Acevedo, are making a combined $180,881 in salary and benefits this year. You’d be hard-pressed to make that kind of money in the private sector with zero Cicsco or Microsoft real-world training certificates to your names. But this ain’t the real world, baby!

Add it all up, and those four people ALONE are costing the taxpayers over $500,000 every year. Cha-ching!! That’s the kind of money that buys the brains and wisdom to spend almost $100,000.00 on an A/V system that REALLY only costs $34,000!

The weird thing is that even with two highly-paid computer “experts”, the IT Department STILL hires outside companies to do consulting work and “IT support”, at even more expense to the city.

That’s right – TSM Consulting is paid $1,800 a month ($21,600 per year) for “IT support and includes on-site visits as well as remote management” for the City of Lampasas [City Council minutes Feb 22, 2016]. Isn’t that odd? I would think that our two experts could handle basic IT stuff…but apparently not.

Sounds to me like just paying TSM $21,600 a year [line item 505-5395] and getting rid of one of our IT “experts” would save a TON of money. But what do I know? I’ve never been paid gobs of money to “manage” or “direct” city government…I just use common sense.