Friday, October 3, 2008

comments

At the Monday Special meeting there was NO oppurtunity for the people to speak. Luckily Dotson spoke for the average resident's concerns and was again the ONLY one making sense. The bottom falls out of the stock market and the effects are felt all around the world. Greedy and crooked Wall street bankers, etc have robbed and pillaged the banking system for their own benefit and that of special interests. Sound familiar? it should. its in these times of fiscal unrest and turmoil that our Council decides to increase our debts by 2.5 million dollars. Not only that, they agreed to pay a full 1% more than was originally agreed upon, costing us, the taxpayers, an EXTRA 20k per year for the next 20 years in interest. we were lowballed again, at the original 4.22 %, and wound up paying the 5.22% rate in the end. A classic bait-and-switch lowball approach that STILL works! That approach will ALSO work with the new gym, starting at 6.8 million, and if you look at their past records, will end up 20 million-plus and take FIVE years to finish. In addition, there will be NO deadlines or penalties written into the contract, constant change orders will lead to millions in cost overruns, and they will continue to raise our fees and taxes to pay for their insanity/lack of judgement/criminality (your choice). We will be stuck paying the bills for the next 20 years. Business as usual. Their pattern has become clear over the past 3+ years and a couple of botched construction projects. On a day when the stock market lost almost a TRILLION dollars of wealth, our Council adds 2.5 million to our debt load, knowing we are sliding into a deep recession at least and people are resorting to garage sales to keep the lights on, as the City Manager said. There was originally hope that the Mayor,Council and City Manager were just inexperienced, naive, inept and/or unqualified for the job, but since they have shown NO improvement over time and continue to throw our tax dollars away by the truckloads, its IMPOSSIBLE to believe anymore that they are just clueless incompetents botching each and every project they have presented to them. NOBODY can be that cluelessly incompetent ALL the time without a HINT of improvement over several years. Its IMPOSSIBLE to be THAT absurdly unconscious ALL the time! A more suspicious, sinister, yet sensible person might believe they are being paid to make these incredibly expensive decisions (to the people). Rigged bids, constant change orders leading to 300-400% cost overruns, no transparency, giveaways of community services, and lowball initial estimates that grow exponentially might be considered signs of corruption, no?

No comments: