Spend, Spend, Spend.....

Many of you who have followed our writings have certainly noticed a lack of entries of late. Sorry. It has been busy trying to keep our heads above water. It seems the city has been equally busy. Or, at least we will give them that excuse. Thus far they have managed to insult the owners of a major new potential employer. Cast aspersions upon their favorite whipping boy the Branson Airport and of course spent money needlessly and wastefully.

As far as the money spending goes, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. It seem the 11 million dollar savings account handed over to the Mayor and her band of marry followers is nearing a zero balance. Not to worry though, we have a great list of accomplishments...

Purchase: 7.5 acres surrounded by city park with virtually no available access and the remnants of an old cabin and shed. Inquires into the value of this fine parcel of historic preservation with several local licensed appraisers sheds a little light. The city paid some $239,000 for what amounts to a $40, 000 value. But the view is wonderful.

Purchase: $200,000 for a old school building that had been on the market for about 3 years. No idea of the actual value. It could be we got a deal. but ask now why we made the purchase and the answer seems to end up with a blank stare of bewilderment. Surely there is no need for reason or plan. Evidently we bought it because it was there.

$150,000, I mean $200,000 or I think $225,000, oh some small amount like that bought our revered kingdom a slightly modified boilerplate novel dubbed "Comprehensive Plan". See, we do need plans. We hired a company from that bastion of green space, tree hugging, anti growth, self loathing gleaming light from the west. We had a need to spend thousands educating our employee plan writers as to how unique and special our community is so they could write a few extra paragraphs and insert them into their one size fits all 20 year plan for the future. A plan that will probably cost another 11 million to start enacting. But we will all be one big happy Kumbaya singing family when we get to the finish line. Broke, but happy with plenty of hiking trails. By then perhaps the voters will tell some of our leaders to take a hike.

Several Hundred Thousand spent in investigation of the previous administrations digressions and misgivings. Yes, it seemed we were in a forever state of investigation for the first two or three years. We had experts scour the books. We had professionals reviewing contracts. We had staff auditing decisions. AND we found some very important answers. We found out that the city under previous administrations made and saved money. Yes lots of money. Nearly 11 million dollars. They had solid contracts with strong companies as partners. They had built a convention center that in spite of a nation wide, if not world wide, recession is performing at or above projections. They encouraged and aided the growth in the private sector and created many new jobs that pay more and have benefits. And much more was learned in the repeated and costly investigations. You might not ever hear the results though. Most investigations led to the results they did not want to hear. The old guard did very well and represented the city properly.

Many more thousands were spent to find out how terrible the past administrations had been in wasting money paying too much for our city employees. Survey a few towns our size around the area and compare their wages and benefits packages to those of our employees. SURVEY SAID..... Branson better start giving raises or demotions and pink slips. Seems workers out on the streets were being paid at one to three levels beneath their counterparts in other cities. Woops....

Legal fees...... Wow! I mean, Wow! Breach of contract must really be an expensive endeavor. But I digress. City of Branson legal expenses are an article if not an entire blog of its own.

Energy Make-over.... How many dollars does it take the City Aldermen to screw in a light bulb??? One Million! OK, lets see if any of you can find a calculator handy and do the math. 1,000,000 dollars and it is expected (hoped) we will save $34,000 per year. Assuming Johnny will be paying ZERO interest on the $1,000,000 loan and assuming the savings is always the government analysis's estimated savings of $34,000 and assuming the city aldermen and our Mayor do not file bankruptcy in the next few years, how many years will it be before Johnny will actually start "saving" money??? That's right about 30 years.



Other Accomplishments:

Affordable Housing - Discussed so many times it became a yawnfest of the utmost. We talked about it, we spoke on it. We dialogued about it. We hemmed and hawed about it and we consulted about it. What we did not do is define it. We also did not make any changes to our development code that would effect it positively.

Signs - Thanks to the leadership of our City board of aldermen and the Mayor, we can all safely drive down Highway 76 without seeing any obnoxious unpermitted Garage Sale signs.

Community-Neighborhood Associations - In true spirit of liberal think tank spiritualism, our alderman board has taken it upon themselves to help form community associations. It seems they do not think our citizens are capable of thinking for themselves and forming an association, unless guided by their superior intellect. In the ever foreseeable actions of this administration, we have spent months organizing and initiating groups into small units of followers. Set aside even smaller subsets of more loyal subjects as leaders and created a movement of feel good rule setting people who will now feel incentivized to show up and root on more important portions of the liberal movement headed by our leadership team in office. But we got logos and monuments out of the deal.

No-Growth and No-jobs: Four years after the famous KY3 interview. We did it. We stopped and took a breath. My biggest fear is we took our last gasping breath this year, or last. The small movements in our chest are just reflexes. So far not a soul has stood up to run for office and see if we can get just a little air pushed back into our empty lungs. I don't blame them. Who wants to be attacked by the adoring press or worse, the like of me. Who wants to volunteer for what should be a few hours a week shaking hands and cutting ribbons, only to find out the micromanagement of this administration has turned that pomp and circumstance office into an 70 hour a week hands on multi-million dollar business. Come to think of it, that is a good question. Why does anyone want and seek that position? What is in it for them? One wonders...