Notice in this new video of MMM where he is trying to reinforce his legacy, he mentions the city’s record 5 year building permit growth.
First off, I have often questioned the actual records being broke. Between 25-40% of the those building permits were from public projects (that we have to pay for, maintain and don’t collect taxes on) or Non-Profit projects (that we don’t collect taxes on) and than there are the number of projects in the private sector that receive TIF’s, tax abatements, other discounts and millions in new infrastructure and upgrades paid for by taxpayers. In fact, all this growth is costing us dearly in these new infrastructure upgrades, and if you don’t believe me, look at your property tax bill and assessment from 2013 and compare it to today.
Some records are fine NOT being broken.
Here is the City Council meeting from Tuesday, 4/17/2018
There is a lot of people running for mayor this time around. And a lot of them are trying to ‘sell’ us their ideas. We don’t need another ‘salesperson’ for mayor.
Besides the backroom deals, the private investments with developers and the total lack of transparency and honesty from 8 years of Huether, ever notice he was always trying to ‘sell’ us something. If it wasn’t the Events Center it was an indoor pool, if it wasn’t the administration building it was the RR redevelopment, and in his final hoorah he sold us a parking ramp that costs double of what it should, doesn’t provide enough parking and puts us in cahoots with someone that is facing civil and Federal charges.
ENOUGH!
With all the debt he piled up with these purchases he cleverly tried paying down some of it with increased fees and taxes and sneaky ‘enterprise’ accounts. From May of 2010 – August of 2017 the administration initiated and the council passed over 50 fee and tax increases.
Now that we have a housing shortage, contractors will tell you that one of the biggest hurdles to providing more housing (even those that can afford it) is regulations. In the same time period above the mayor and council passed over 70 new code ordinances.
And what about the debt? Also in this same period there was 50 supplemental appropriations passed (extra budgeting) and 15 revenue bonds.
Our next mayor needs to stop selling us stuff because it is costing us dearly. It is actually hurting growth, mostly in sales tax revenue. People don’t buy things when they are immersed in personal debt and high taxes and fees.
Our next mayor needs to hold the brakes on spending, increasing taxes and fees, and passing more regulations (we actually need to work on eliminating some). We need to get back to providing reliable public services at an affordable rate. The monument building needs to put on hold, and we need to focus on the most important thing in our city – IT’s PEOPLE!
I couldn’t agree more with that statement. During his last hour long ‘Ask the Mayor’ they did a tour of his office, on one of the shelves was this book next to a couple drink tumblers. They never commented on the book.
But one of the more astonishing moments was when Reed asked Mike if there was any disappointments during his term, or things he didn’t get done. He said he could only think of one, but said he tried to fix it, and that was Public Transit. Really?!
I wasn’t expecting him to throw himself under the bus, but you couldn’t think of ANYTHING ELSE?! Nothing!?
While I could comment on a host of things in his final propaganda show, the one thing that sticks out is he never really mentions that being an elected official is really about SERVING the PUBLIC. You will notice it was all about HIM and GETTING THINGS DONE. I’m glad he will go back to ‘Being Fun Again’ for his daughter.
He reactivated his FB and Twitter account today. I also heard he has put applications in at several places for a new job. Rumor has it one of them was with USD for President. That’s all we need, one of our public universities ran by a subprime credit card salesman.
UPDATE: I guess my initial takeaway is that this shouldn’t surprise anyone. I think people are getting so used to the games with transparency it just seems par for the course.
I think the biggest thing here is the confidentiality EO. As Janet pointed out words like ‘sensitive’ don’t really mean anything, and can be interpreted however. For example, if a maintenance employee told the Argus that the city spent $2 million dollars last year on toilet paper, and the mayor found out who told them, they technically could tell this employee that it was ‘sensitive’ information and terminate them. Basically a scare tactic to keep city employees from saying anything. While these kind of ‘rules’ exist in the corporate world, they have NO place in city government. Records should be open (besides litigation and personnel). City employees should not have to fear losing their job over it.
There is also a question of violating Federal whistle blower laws. Since the city receives Federal funds, those laws apply to city employees. City employees should have the right, Federally to report any misuse of Federal money or fraud. Federal Law almost always trumps state and local laws and ordinances.
As for the city clerk, I will say what I said when they hired Mr. Greco. They should not have hired him. The clerks office has two certified city clerks, one of them applied for the job after Lorie quit, she should have gotten it, instead, the HR department, controlled by the mayor not city council, picked someone with no certification, Greco wasn’t even registered to vote. We could go back and forth all we want about the lack of certification, the truth is, it should have never been an issue. Some would say that we would have lost one of the assistant clerks. Oh well, I think one main clerk and an assistant is enough. I would even go further and say we also should terminate the budget analyst since nobody knows what he really does, besides openly mocking councilors during public meetings like he did last Tuesday. Any duties he has could be easily handled by the Operations Manager. After they fired Debra it seems the office has gone to Hell in a handbasket, we had to hire 3 people to replace her, and they have less duties, and they take orders from the mayor.
It is also important to note that the city clerk is the responsibility of the city council, not the administration. He could have been sent to certification school on day one if they wanted to send him. I will be curious to hear what his excuse is, I’m sure it is some obscure rule pulled from the rear of Bill TheToole, the HR Director.