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Observations on the council meeting and how the stack the deck

Listener: Dick H.
Category: Lubbock City Politics
Date: 24 Apr 2008
Time: 14:00:36 -0700
Remote Name: 66.140.100.171

Comments

I attended the City Council meeting on the visitor center today and have a few observations regarding this meeting. Here are a few things that I observed:

1. The City loads these meetings with visitors that either work for the city or have financial interests that benefit from the project the City Staff is touting.

2. The City brought in a lawyer from Austin who works for the Hotel/Motel Association to tell us how wonderful the project would be for Lubbock and THAT IS WAS ILLEGAL TO USE THE HOTEL/MOTEL TAX TO UPGRADE THE CIVIC CENTER. I wonder who paid for the lawyer to come to Lubbock? Mikel Ward pointed out that there were several occasions in the past when the City had used these funds to remodel the Civic Center. Ms. Ward confronted the attorney after the meeting and he told her it was subject to interpretation as to whether the funds could be used to remodel the Civic Center. I wonder whose interpretation would be used to determine how these funds could be used? Could it be City Hall’s version based on what they wanted to do at the time they have some unneeded project in mind?

3. The cost for the Visitor Center would be over $900 per square foot but the average cost for three other visitor centers in Texas was $280 per square foot. The tear down costs for clearing the land for this visitor center is over $200 per square foot. Do these extravagant costs make you want to trust this city council to handle spending hundreds of millions of dollars for water for Lubbock? This will be the Taj Mahal of visitor centers in Texas and possibly the United States.

4. Several speakers touted how the visitor center will bring many visitors to Lubbock and make them stay here longer. I checked with several visitor centers around the area and none of them have more than 10,000 to 12,000 visitors a year. There is no verifiable evidence that these visitor centers cause people to visit the areas involved or caused them to stay even one day longer.

5. Mayor Miller stated that the Visitor Center would only be financed for 7 or 8 years which was contrary to what some city staff had said outside the meeting. Are these people on the same page in what is going on?

6. The Mayor also bragged about the new bond rating that would save Lubbock a lot of money. The $86,000,000 in bonds the City Council plans to issue in a few days will cost us $110,000 less in interest. Adding the $86,000,000 bond issue to the $241,000,000 planned issue you get $327,000,000 on which we would save $418,000 in interest costs. This amounts to less that one-tenth of one percent. I had a 5th grade teacher that used to ask the question if you went to the store and an item cost $100 and you could buy the item at a 10% discount how much money would you save? A lot of people answered $10 but you did not save anything because you spent $90.

7. Later I heard on the news that the City Council had voted to cut the cost of the visitor center back to $5.9 million. What a wonderful deal for the taxpayers.

8. The City Manager bragged that more often than not the city came in under budget on projects. I have worked for government organizations all my life and can tell you how that game works. When planning and budgeting for a project they almost always plan and budget for more costs than they actually think the project will cost. This allows them to look good for coming in under budget on a project. It is a good way to get a raise for your brilliant planning.

9. Linda DeLeon told Todd Klein that he probably could expect opposition to the dog pound project. In other words if you question one of my pet projects you can expect retaliation. It takes a lot of gall to publicly make a threat like this against another council member just because of opposition to another councilman’s pet project.

The bottom line to all this waste of taxpayer funds is how can we trust this council to wisely spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a water project when they are so out of control on building a simple visitor center? Right now we have the “perfect storm” brewing in the City of Lubbock. We have four councilmen that are intent on raising taxes as much as possible and spending as much as possible. Assisting these four councilmen are the City Manager, City Attorney and their respective staffs. When the combination of these people all conspire to spend our tax money on the belief that we tax and spend ourselves into prosperity then the Lubbock taxpayers are in for some rough and stormy times.

Dick Hudgens
Lubbock