Yeah, I know, you can’t make this crap up (Item #7);
It appears the city council is hiring the same company (Polco) who did the National Community Survey to do a survey about government engagement. Council was already told what they need to work on;
For the record, this may be just a back payment for the survey and other consulting work, but that is usually paid in advance, so it appears they are doing another survey to figure out why the first survey turned out so bad. This is insanity. You need to have a public forum at the convention center and have constituents present their open government ideas to your FACE! You are so scared of the general public you have to blow $30K on another survey so you don’t have to interact with the public. Do you even have an inkling on how open government works? Apparently not.
I wonder if the comments will be deleted from this survey also?
You also ONLY have a month to put OPEN GOVERNMENT transparency on the June ballot. That would be my suggestion, let the voters decide how transparent their government needs to be by putting a package of open government ordinances on the general ballot. But that would have taken planning and having public forums on it starting this past summer. They were to busy trying to build a fence around Dudley.
Oh, and I find it funny the city is spending $500K on the Pavilion’s garage, and subsidizes the Lodge restaurant at the ice ribbon to the tune of $300K a year (also ran by the Pavilion). Did you also know the Pavilion offers NO free programming. Zilch! The art museum WAS free, but Mr. Greedy who runs the Pavilion broke that promise and started charging us. IMO, the subsidies to the Pavilion need to end since there is ZERO public benefit without purchasing a ticket. And even though it is a city owned building, upgrades and maintenance should be paid for by the Pavilion, and there should be a lease agreement.
But we need to cut other subsidies;
I would agree with the city that a review of services needed to be conducted with NGO’s receiving city funds, but why weren’t we doing this all along? Oh that’s right, because our elected leaders and city management are incompetent. I also think the city should do zero based budgeting. In other words, the city should start each department with $0 at the beginning of the budgeting process and justify their budget and expenditures. Right now, they just tack a percentage onto last year’s budget and march forward. It is lazy and it costs taxpayers probably over $100 million a year+ in unneeded expenditures and budgeting. We have a full-time finance department, they should be working on this all year long and getting rid of waste!
I agree with Mike Z, that the city council needs to do a full investigation and forensic audit of every single city department if they really want to get unnecessary spending under control.
I’m sure they’ll take another survey before making that decision though.