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Price demonstrates city decision made from ignorance

Listener: Dick H.
Category: Lubbock City Politics
Date: 02 Apr 2008
Time: 21:14:26 -0700
Remote Name: 66.140.100.171

Comments

Pratt,

The other day Floyd Price was on the KFYO morning show and I sent an email to Chad to ask Floyd if he knew what kind of attendance rates that visitor centers in comparable towns like Abilene, Odessa or Amarillo had. Mr. Price stated that he did not know what the attendance rates were for these visitor centers but he could find out.

It seems to me that Mr. Price and the rest of the council should have known this information before spending $7 million dollars of our money. I don't suggest that Mr. Price should have known the exact numbers but a ball-park figure shouldn't be that hard to remember. The City Council and the City Administration are always quick to cite comparable statistics of other cities when it serves their purpose. I think that the attendance of other visitor centers in the area is a relevant question to ask rather than taking the word of some city administrator that other visitors centers had good attendance by out of town visitors. I don't think the City Council had a clue about these visitor center attendance rates. This reminds me of the City Council taking the word of the city traffic engineer about the red light cameras without any investigation into information from other sources.

I also have information from other sources that the City Council did not discuss where the funding for operating the visitor center would come from. Will the funding for operating expenses come from the hotel/motel tax or will it come from our property taxes? I think this is a relevant question to ask along with the estimated costs of operating a visitor center. My guess is that a visitor center will cost at least a half million dollars a year to operate and since the City has threatened us with reduced police protection when the red light camera revenue was in question I would like to know what service they are going to cut if this funding comes out of the general tax funds.

This visitor center debacle just points out the inability of most of this City Council to ask the right questions and make good business decisions when projects are brought before them by the City Administration. We are in trouble if we do not get some new council members that can exercise better judgment when they start to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars on the upcoming water project and infrastructure projects. We need to pray for rain and a new city council since we are in great need of both of these things.

Dick Hudgens
Lubbock