Tag: waste of money

Seven Goldfish Move Into Their New $1,500,000.00 Fishbowl

Huzzah! The $1,500,000.00 Talbert/deGraffenreid Wow-Factor Vanity Project is supposedly finally done, according to today’s Dispatch!! Only a year late and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget!

I’m not sure why they waited until four days AFTER the Oct 28th City council meeting to trumpet this thing in the newspaper. Why not do your big Dispatch puff piece BEFORE the meeting? That way the highly engaged and intelligent electorate can come and gaze upon the majesty of its many big-screen TVs and its $95,000 no-bid A/V system, right?

Maybe it’s just MOSTLY done and not ALL done. Kinda like the ‘shovel-ready’ corpse repository business park. That would also explain why the Dispatch article says that City officials have announced that “a formal open house and dedication ceremony is planned in December” instead of making the same announcement last week. Gives them another month to actually make it ALL done, right?

I think one of the funniest parts of the article is where Spinley deGraffenreid explains to us morons that selling the entire building to Joe Corcoran in 2013 for $75,000 [which is less than $7 per square foot!] and then BUYING BACK THE EXACT SAME BUILDING IN 2015 FOR $229,000 was ACTUALLY a stroke of genius. BAHAHAHAHA. I gotta hand it to Spinley – I have no idea how he keeps a straight face when he makes these outlandish claims.

The explanation for paying over TRIPLE what they sold it for two years earlier? Well, I guess old Joe made some ‘improvements’ to the place – like new windows and a NEW ROOF, according to the Dispatch article.

New roof??? Weird. Because, as I recall, despite the idiots at JNW Architects collecting a check for declaring the building structurally sound [May 2016] and “in good shape”, City council LATER approved almost FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS TO RE-ROOF back on September 20th, 2018!

Spinley also loves repeating his fairy tale that the renovation was ‘only’ $1.02 million, because that’s how much they handed over to ASJ Construction. He doesn’t count all the other stuff – like the $154,000 they wasted buying back the building…the $54,000 to JNW Architects to make a bunch of mistakes consult…the no-bid $95,000 AV system…the $60,000 fire suppression system..$12,780 for 100 stackable chairs to hold the throngs of City Council attendees…$8,055 for OTHER Council furnishings…$50,000 contingency….random furnishings….the $128,400 elevator…the $45,000 roof repair that was supposedly already done by Corcoran….. and a WHOLE BUNCH of other stuff.

Only in the mind of a government bozo do those costs not count. The REAL number is WELL OVER $1.5 million, my man.

Here is a summary of just a small bit of the stupidity – the roof:

November 2013: City council decides to sell the building to Joe Corcoran for $75,000 or less that $7 per square foot.

In 2015: City council The Seven Goldfish decide to buy the same building back for $229,000 – apparently forgetting (as goldfish are prone to doing) they just sold it for $75,000. They claim the $154,000 wasted is ok because Joe fixed some windows and put on a new roof. Joe triples his money in less than two years. Your tax dollars at work.

May 23, 2016: JNW Architects said the building “is in good condition”

October 2016: Finley hands JNW another $18,000 for “structural analysis and provide documentation” for the building.

September 2018: Finley comes begging to City council for $45,000 to re-roof the building. Council The Seven Goldfish, forgetting (as goldfish are prone to do) that the building was already deemed awesome and structurally sound, agree to fork over the $45,000 with no questions.

This would all be hilarious if it was happening to Chicago or Austin Copperas Cove…but no. Sadly these morons are running OUR city. How many more millions need to be wasted before people wake up?

More Proof That The LEDC Is Wasting Their $120,000.00 On The Halff Associates Consulting Contract

As I’ve reported here before, the City is currently in the midst of wasting $120,000.00 on a ‘consulting contract’ with Halff Associates to ’empower the community’ and ‘give everyone a voice’ in the future of Lampasas.

This is a fool’s errand, as I have ALSO pointed out before….but I offer more proof here today.

A recent article in The Dispatch details the demolition of an old locker plant and ice house at 707 Pecan Street for possible retail and upscale apartment development.

The response on Facebook was swift and diverse: a bunch of people complained that a six-story building is turning us into Austin and is no good for the city. Another group thought it was a great idea because we need more housing here. Yet another group bitched that we don’t need more retail space since there are TONS of empty storefronts on Key Ave AND Town Square (good point, I might add).

In short, you can’t get 50 Lampassholes to agree on anything, let alone 6,000 of them. It would be like herding cats. Throw in the fact that probably 35% of the ‘cats’ fall into the “retarded” section of an IQ Bell curve, and you can see my point.

Already people are arguing about the upcoming Burger King: either it sucks and we don’t need more fast food places OR it’s awesome because they love Burger King and it provides jobs. You will NEVER get a consensus asking a thousand dummies what is “best” for the future of Lampasas, so why are you wasting $120,000 trying to do so?

I don’t care what Mike Irvin (the developer) does. Frankly, I don’t think another 10,000 square feet of retail is needed in this town, but it’s his nickel and not mine. Maybe he’s right. However, I WILL have a BIG problem if he goes hat-in-hand to City council begging for money like the last several developers have (successfully) done.

The Halff Associates survey and consulting is also a waste of time for another reason: the Seven Goldfish have ALREADY decided which way we will be going in the future and that is obviously growth at any cost. This is evident by the hundreds of thousands of dollars they give away to developers and waste on dumb shit like a ‘business park’.

The smart thing to do is stop trying to steer the local economy like some third-world communist politburo. The free market works just fine. Disband the idiotic LEDC and stop wasting money on this crap. Either way, soon enough you will have a wave of liberal asswipes moving here from Austin and Georgetown and Liberty Hill and it will have NOTHING to do with the work of Mandy Walsh and the LEDC or the wisdom of The Seven Goldfish. It’s going to happen naturally as people try to escape the traffic and regulations of the “big city” for greener pastures.

Of course, none of this logic and truth will stop The Seven Goldfish from throwing money at idiotic ‘planning’ efforts. Halff will walk off into the sunset $120,000 richer while the LEDC chases their tail for another year.

ArtoberFest Draws ‘Major’ Crowd – $115 Porta-Potties Easily Handle Bathroom Needs

So I attended ArtoberFest yesterday for the first time ever. Not out of any need to paint my face or eat food truck fare…but rather to further prove my point about the colossal waste of a NO-BID $185,000 bathroom in Campbell Park.

I would peg the crowd at maybe 100 people – and I was there at 2:30 in the afternoon. I guess that would be considered ‘major’ by Lampasas standards. Maybe another 100 moved through there during the day before and after I was there. Point being, the head of the Parks Department chimed in last month that there are “four major events a year there, so we need a bathroom” or something to that effect. My argument is that a couple of Porta-Potties should handle that need just fine – especially when your “huge crowds” of 150 people only happen about 3 to 5 total days a year (or roughly 1% of the time).

The sanitation needs were met by J Bar Sanitary Restrooms – and they were SPECTACULAR! I do not work for J Bar. I have never heard of J Bar until yesterday. But their Porta-potties are the best I have ever seen. No joke. I highly recommend. They were pristine.

And guess what else?? They are cheap as dirt! You can rent one of these for an entire WEEK for $115! That is a steal. Of course, somebody overdid it with FOUR of these things when two would have sufficed yesterday, but whatever. Here is a shot of $460 dollars worth of toilets – it would take over 100 years to spend that same $185,000 on Porta-Potties, by the way:

Extra-large model on the left accommodates those users of Haywoodian proportions

The bathroom I used looked like it hadn’t been used all day – and that was 4.5 hours into the festival. So I’m pretty sure two of these would have sufficed – for a total cost of only about $250 to the city.

But let’s take it a step further! There were about 6 food trucks and 12 other vendors there – which (according to the Chamber of Commerce website) should have brought in close to $1000 in fees from those vendors. Why should the city pay anything at all? Take the $250 from your vendor revenue and voila….a zero-cost, extremely clean bathroom at every ‘major’ event. Bathrooms that are hassle-free and DON’T NEED TO BE CLEANED by the City!!

I realize that my plan outlined above makes logical, rational and economic sense. It is bulletproof and has already been proven to work….which is why Spinley and the Seven Goldfish are ignoring it and instead plowing ahead with the idiotic $185,000 no-bid bathroom [page 67]….a bathroom that will also have to be cleaned by somebody – a somebody who will be on the City payroll [page 73] and reaping tons of benefits that will likely cost the taxpayer $30 an hour.

Spinley assures us that “the Campbell park restrooms should be delivered the first or second week of December“. Of course, he didn’t specify what year the “December” would fall in. Watch for the usual cost overruns and delays in completion like we saw with the Magic Elevator at Old City Hall.

Only in Lampasas can you find dummies who want to spend $185,000 to solve a ‘problem’ that can demonstrably be solved for $0.

City Monkeys Pay SurveyMonkey $120,000.00 For FREE Service. Seriously.

For those of you living under a rock, the geniuses at City Hall (and the LEDC) have recently retained Halff Associates, a ‘consulting’ firm, to help “plan the future of Lampasas”.

I have largely ignored this fiasco because it is such a terrible idea and a colossal waste of time. The kinds of people who will answer this survey are the same morons who live on Facebook and say that “we need a Starbucks!” or “we need a drive-in movie theater!” and have IQs of about 86 and a net worth of $152. They haven’t the faintest clue that you need a certain sized population with a certain income level to support those types of businesses.

They think that because THEY like the idea and it “got a bunch of likes on Facebook” (yes, that really happened) that that makes it a viable business that will flourish and profit (yes, I’m looking at you Ashley Cain).

Of course, on their very next Facebook post, those same geniuses are begging people for $25 so they can ‘finish their schooling in crystal healing’ or begging for a free crib for their infant. In short, people with no money and no brains will not be good Starbucks customers. People WITH money and brains know this – which is why they won’t open a Starbucks in the first place. It would go out of business in about six weeks.

This basic fact of life is clearly lost on the “city planners” and the Lampasas Economic Development Corporation. The LEDC wastes piles of money on useless and fruitless endeavors every year: business parks, conventions, buzz words, brainstorming sessions, vision statements, Texas Municipal League conventions….and now $120,000.00 on a ‘survey’ from Halff Associates.

Out of curiosity, I finally went to waste 20 minutes of my life to take the survey – mainly to give a bunch of incorrect answers and throw off the results. Lo and behold, this big, expensive $120,000 project is actually just a survey on SurveyMonkey.com! Holy Christ! ANYBODY can go to SurveyMonkey and do their own survey! The basic plan is FREE!!! The most expensive is $75. Yet these City bozos and politicians just paid Halff Associates $120,000.00 to go and put up a survey for them! My god, how stupid can you be? They could have done this themselves FOR FREE or nearly free!

I have to hand it to Halff Associates. They look like consummate scam artists with this racket they are running. They go to some desperate dummy politicians and low-IQ City bureaucrats with the promise of “developing” the economy and “giving everyone a say in the community” or some other flowery bullshit. They charge them $120,000 for their “expertise” and then they just go to a WEBSITE THAT ALREADY EXISTS (surveymonkey.com) and throw up a survey in about 30 minutes! I bet they even use the exact same questions for every city they rip off with this scam! It’s already all written and ready to go! They are essentially stealing $120,000 from Lampasas for probably about 75 minutes of work.

When the dust settles, Lampasas will have wasted $120,000 on an essentially free service which will give answers from some of the dumbest people** in town. You gotta love government work.

[**Bruce Haywood approves of this survey]

LEDC Hands Another $100,000 From “Business Park” Slush Fund to Pope Eckermann

Another ritualistic tithe has been handed to Pope Eckermann The Engineer – this time by the Lampasas Economic Development Corp. The LEDC is a non-profit group that takes large piles of tax money and sets them on fire in various imaginative ways – all in the name of “developing the Lampasas economy”.

This ritualistic destruction of tax money is performed by some of the same people who squander tax dollars over at City Council: Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert and TJ “No Insulting Nickname Yet” Monroe.

Some of the ways they have torched taxpayer money in the past include $8,000 to ‘develop an LEDC website’ and then directly handing Monica Wright $6,000 per year AND handing CivicPlus $1,575 per year to ‘manage’ said website, $767,768.00 (years ago) to Qro-Mex to run a water/waste water line to the still-non-existent “business park” which sits there as a 165-acre weed patch, $230,000.00 to run electricity to the same weed patch, close to $100,000 per year to the LEDC Director to, well, direct stuff (and go to countless useless conventions like TML, Save Your Town, Stand Up Rural America, plus workshops, round tables, brain storming and years of wasted time before finally deciding to pay Halff Associates $120,000 to just do the job for them) …..plus many, many, many thousands of dollars to repeatedly produce videos to “promote Lampasas” which are placed on YouTube, viewed 403 times by the LEDC and city employees and then promptly forgotten.

That’s just a taste of the waste.

But now, apparently in order to “do SOMETHING” on the 165-acre weed patch (after spinning their wheels for 7 years) and to throw good money after bad, the LEDC has decided to hand Pope Eckermann The Engineer $100,000 to “develop PART of the business park”. This is a STEAL compared to the $125,000 Pope Eckermann originally tried to squeeze out of the LEDC just a month earlier.

This bizarre compulsion to throw money at Pope Eckermann makes me wonder if he has compromising photos of members of LEDC and City Council. It simply boggles the mind.

What do we get for this six-figure payoff to the Pope? Topics of discussion included: project management (nice and vague), drainage analysis, the ever-present “geotech report”, fee schedule (?), project limits (??), bid phase services (???), approvals and permits, construction documents and a bunch of other buzz words that sound like about $8,000 of real work to an honest-working rube like myself who possesses no compromising photos of anybody, unfortunately.

We will delve into detailed history of LEDC money wasting soon – mainly focusing on this disastrous ‘business park” debacle.

Finley’s Folly To Cost Another $16,417…And Take Longer Than Expected

As reported in the Lampasas Dispatch today, Council voted unanimously to ignite another $16,417 in taxpayer funds.  ASJ Construction change order #3 to raise the ceiling 9 feet and repair/replace a bunch of duct work was approved this week.

This sure doesn’t look like a project that will be done “mid December”, does it?  That’s because it isn’t anymore.  The completion date has been pushed back yet again and “City officials now hope the building will be ready for use in early 2019,” according to The Dispatch article.

Nice and vague!  They HOPE the building will be ready in ‘early 2019’.  Gives them a ton of wiggle room – AND lots of time for more change orders!!  Cha-ching!!