Bush League Move By County Council
In a surprise move at yesterday’s meeting the county council has decided to cut the commissioners’ pay - effectively making them part time employees. Their new salary will be $35k starting in July 1 - a reduction from their currently salary of $65k. Evidently councilman Paul Moss wasn’t happy with the commissioners’ progress (via Kevin Knuth at ACDP blog):
County Councilman Paul Moss was on WOWO this afternoon (around 4:35pm) and he said this move was done primarily because commissioners had an “inability to get things moving forward”. Councilman Moss specifically mentioned the lack of progress on combining the 911 call center with the city.
There has been tension between the commissioners and council for some time and the truth is we don’t need 3 full time commissioners, but I hardly doubt the citizens will be better served with 3 part-time commissioners. The county council could have waited as the state legislature will likely pick up the issue in the upcoming session when they debate the idea of a single county executive - a model that would be much more efficient than the 3 person commission.
But there’s another aspect to this that isn’t getting enough attention, namely that it is a bush league maneuver to sandbag the commissioners the way the council did. If you are going to make major administrative changes then you should be professional enough to give the people involved a heads-up - it’s common courtesy.
I will be the first to admit that there are many issues that I think the commissioners have been wrong about but the county council has always struck me as the least impressive board in all of county government - perhaps the recently elected Bob Armstrong will improve that image.
So while one might view the commissioners as ineffective you might want to consider that the county council filling that void could be an even worse alternative…
Up In Flames
Thanks to Derek Pillie for sending in this photo of the Harrison Square fire - readers should feel free to add their own caption…
Fire breaks out at Harrison Square Parking Garage
$’s saved due to HPGN????
Councilman Tim Pape at Monday’s City Council meeting, during the public comments section, made the statement that “the employees of the High Performance Government Network are those reponsible for saving the city over $30 million since the year 2000″. Keep in mind that these same persons worked for the city as employees for seven of these eight years, since they joined the HPGN non-profit at the start of 2008, so a large part of these proported savings would have been savings they “earned” for the city as part of their jobs.
The “revised” (September 30, 2008) contract between the HPGN group and the city includes a “receivable” listed as “operating 12 High Performance Exectutive Overview sessions”, one of which is scheduled for this Friday, 12/19/2008, in the IML room on the third floor of the City County Building. These sessions, per the informational brochure are for’ “mayors, county exectutives, division heads, senior leaders, and department heads” and is advertised as a look-see at how High Performance Government can save millions of dollars for your political entity. Of what value are these sessions to the Fort Wayne taxpayer? Why are we hiring a group to run these sessions WHERE THE MAIN BENEFIT will be to get more business for HPGN?? You say, but there is no cost to the city? Guess who are making the presentations - taxpayer paid employees of the city!
To give some indication of what the savings to our city due to the work of these individuals, over the seven years plus the year we are in, the city website has a section with the heading, ” Lean Six Sigma - Project Summaries”. The opening paragraph reads,”Six Sigma has decreased cost, improved customer service and increased productivity throughout city government. Projects have resulted in over @10 million of savings or cost avoidance.” Listed below are the projects listed as well as some comments by me about the significance of each:
Under SIX SIGMA:
Congress is so dumb that…
Our representatives in Congress are really, really dumb.
Back in July I had two posts detailing why I opposed HB 3221.
HB 3221 is a bill that was pushed through Congress with 99% Democratic support and 24% - 33% Republican support.
Basically Congress intended to re-finance loans at taxpayer expense in order to keep people in the homes that they cannot (And could often never) afford.
The Congressional Budget Office felt in July that HB 3221 would allow 400,000 homeowners to keep their homes at taxpayer expense.
As usual Congress was 100% wrong.
This law was so complicated that I went to three local mortgage companies and trained their agents on the tax implications of the law. After each training session I asked the mortgage brokers in the room if they thought this law would keep more people in their homes. There were a total of about 30 mortgage brokers in those training sessions and not one thought it would do much.
I was right as were the mortgage brokers. The only people who thought this plan would work was Congress; mostly Democrats in Congress.
This bill is a massive failure. Read this article on why it failed! Per the HUD Chief to date only 312 people have even applied for the program that Congress intended to keep 400,000 people in their homes.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should both resign. They are both almost as inept as President George W. Bush.
Mike Sylvester
Chrysler to shutdown until January 19th!
Chrysler is closing all of its manufacturing facilities until January 19th, 2009.
Per my understanding of the UAW contracts most workers will receive 85% - 90% of their pay from a combination of Chrysler and state unemployment funds. Per the story most white collar workers will still receive their pay from Chrysler. So this shutdown will save Chrysler only a limited amount of money. This is of course ABSURD. They cannot even save a significantamount of money by closing their factories because they have to keep paying people not to work.
Many Democrats and liberals are predictably trying to blame this on President Bush and the Republicans.
These Democrats and liberals are morons.
Chrysler has sold between 30% and 40% less cars than they expected in 2008. That is why they are shutting down; they should shut down. In fact, they should have done this earlier in the year when they saw sales drop. Any prudent business would have cut production several months ago…
Chrysler is hurting because American consumers are not buying new cars at the same pace as prior years. American consumers are not buying new cars on a pace similar to prior years because:
1. Many Americans have been forced to decrease spending due to the recession.
2. Many more Americans have decreased spending because their confidence is shaken in the economy.
3. The banks have stopped loaning money to people who are bad credit risks; note that they used to ignorantly loan these people money which was a terrible banking strategy.
The shutdown at Chrysler has NOTHING to do with President Bush, The Republicans, or The Democrats specifically; it has to do with the recession, the decrease in consumer confidence, and the fact that banks have stopped loaning money to people that are bad credit risks.
Mike Sylvester
How Much Longer?
Looks like city controller Pat Roller will be sticking around at least another month. Frankly I’m somewhat surprised they announced this given the latest High Performance Government contract revelation and her less-than-forthcoming appearance before city council.
I’m still somewhat amazed that the city controller can be asked to go before council and talk about a state audit regarding a controversial contract and not reveal that she has recently signed a new replacement contract one day after the audit took place. She simply played them for fools and it was a direct insult to city council and their oversight authority…
High Performance Government Contract Revised One Day After State Audit (Update)
My public access request for a copy of the High Performance Government Network contract (pages 1, 2, 3) was finally granted and what I found was quite interesting.
Readers might remember that the original HPGN contract was a hastily concocted one-page document essentially saying that the city was paying a $95k membership fee to join the organization. There was quite an uproar about this at the time and the State Board of Accounts even singled this contract out in their audit:
We recommend this contract be approved by Common Council before any additional payments to HPG Network are remitted.
We could not verify that the city received $95,000 in services for the year 2007 when the contract was only in effect for four days in 2007 (December 27, 2007 to December 31, 2007) and while the HPG Network employees were also city employees.
Now in the most recent HPGN city council discussion we found out that the city wasn’t simply paying for membership dues but that the $95k we paid in 2007 was for 2008 services. This was contrary to the original contract and previous administration statements. One could only surmise that the administration’s change in tune was due to the SBOA rebuke.
But now that I’ve obtained the latest contract I think the evidence speaks for itself. The SBOA audit is dated Sept 29 and the city executed a new contract with the HPGN on Sept 30 - with a little more detail, probably in an attempt to satisfy the SBOA’s complaints. Yet the administration still ignored the SBOA recommendation that the contract be approved by city council. I think this generates a whole new set of questions.
Why did the city deem it necessary to execute a new contract one day after the SBOA audit? And perhaps more importantly given the history of this contract, why wasn’t that information provided to councilmembers before the last discussion?
This contract still stinks but the stench is getting worse by the day. Signing a new contract one day after the SBOA audit and not telling anyone on city council (not to mention the public) is unacceptable. The more one digs at this the more muck comes to the surface…
Update: Stephen Parker of Around Fort Wayne has video of last night’s council meeting where councilman Mitch Harper comments on the newly revealed HPGN contract.
Spiece & Gym Rats Interview
Last Sunday I sat down with Anne Davis of Spiece Fitness and Todd Hensley of Gym Rats to try and clear up a few things regarding the document Davis recently released. For those of you that don’t remember, that document highlighted the economic impact Gym Rats has on this community and pointed out that their lease expires in 2010.
There’s been quite a bit of community discussion about that document since then but I thought people might want to hear about it directly from the stakeholders. So, as mentioned in the previous post, here’s our first FWP podcast…
I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank Mike Harvey for alerting me to the story and for helping to set up the interview…
FWP in 2009 - Video, iTunes and ???
So with the new year coming we have been looking at changes we’d like to make here at FWP and one of things we will definitely get back to doing is more video. Technical difficulties have slowed that effort but I would expect us to be back on track in early January.
Another item we’ve decided to explore is podcasting. The conventional wisdom here in the local blogosphere is that people just won’t listen to audio over the internet. That may or may not be true but we’re going to test that hypothesis. So we will be conducting regular short interviews (~10 min or less) on a variety of local news and political topics and podcasting them.
What this means is that you will be able to listen to the interviews from the main FWP page or you will be able to subscribe to the feed using iTunes. This will allow you to download new content to your iPod whenever it becomes available by simply subscribing to the free FWP feed in the iTunes store. We’ll have more on this later when the feed becomes available.
We’re kicking around some other ideas as well but feedback from the readers is always welcome. If you have suggestions/complaints/ideas regarding what we could be doing then leave them in the comments or shoot me an e-mail…
Henry Blasts Liz Brown, Irks Harper
Yesterday the mayor signed the controversial lighting ordinance recently passed by city council. He also made an interesting decision to publicly chastise councilwoman Liz Brown for suggesting residents call 911 if they have problems with their neighbor’s lights. Councilman Mitch Harper has now hit back on the mayor suggesting that Brown’s comments were sarcastic in nature and that the real people wasting police time are the mayor and the councilmembers that voted for the ordinance:
Mayor Tom Henry seemed to miss the point regarding the new extension of police powers he signed. Or maybe just his public information staff did.
In either event, his inclusion of a gratuitous negative comment regarding Councilwoman Brown’s remarks following the vote on the new ordinance outlawing “discomfort” from a neighboring house’s light showed that his office didn’t understand that is the Mayor and the Council members who voted FOR the ordinance who were creating a new burden on 911 and the city police.
I think it should also be noted that this is the second time the mayor’s staff has chosen to jab Brown over her comments. In a recent article PIO Rachel Blakeman also brought up Brown’s 911 comments:
Henry’s biggest concern Wednesday was Councilwoman Liz Brown’s suggestion that residents call 911 with lighting complaints. Brown, R-at-large, voted against the law. Residents should instead call 311 or 427-1222, the non-emergency line for city police, Blakeman said.
“That is a very irresponsible use of 911,” she said.
Now maybe Brown had that one coming for changing her vote to eliminate Blakeman’s position during the final budget meeting. It’s one thing for the mayor’s staff to get a single jab in but to bring it up twice - and for the mayor to personally mention it the second time - is going to rub people the wrong way. I’m not sure what the political calculus was behind Henry’s decision but I think he got bad advice on this one….
