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| Anyone care for peanuts? |
After the big push that was given this confab by every communications venue available to the city, the Sierra Madre Room ended up looking like a Monday night game at just about any lower echelon minor league baseball park stuck with a last place team. A tiny smattering of bemused individuals lost amongst the long rows of empty seats.
Of course, there is a perfectly logical explanation for this. When you know that there will be no opportunity to speak your mind, that questions can only be asked by first writing them on a card so that the City Manager might decide if they're copacetic with her agenda, and that the information being given out would basically be the same stale material you've heard a dozen times before, why would anyone want to go? It is called voting with your feet, and last night most of the feet in town voted no.
Once again the City Manager turned what could have been a beneficial public forum into a tightly controlled infomercial taping. The meeting was filmed, of course, and will be available for later viewing on the city's website. Which explains the written postcards. There was no way that this City Hall cared to hear the actual concerns of the people they are supposed to be working for. And certainly they were not going to allow any such unvarnished honesty to make it into their nice new water rate biopic.
City Hall might be looking for more of your money, but that does not mean they're interested in having to tolerate your opinions as well. I'm fairly certain that the consultant hired on our dime to teach them such techniques had to have specifically advised against that sort of thing.
The water bond avoidance scenario went something like this. About half of Bruce Inman's presentation was given to reciting a laundry list of quite expensive capital expenditures that he believes need to be made. Bruce's golden rainbow included $440,900 for a Mountain Trail water main, $463,000 for a Well 4 rehab, $830,750 for a Well 5 rehab, $422,215 for sewer lining and spot repairs, and $908,938 in local match cash for a Santa Anita water diversion structure. To give you just a small sampling from his wish list.
So the obvious question was how the City plans to pay for these kinds of things. And this is what I wrote on the little card that I'd been handed:
How are these capital repairs and improvements to be paid for? Additional bonds? Loans? Water rate hikes? Or bake sales?
I'd hoped the bake sales bit might sneak me past the screen. However, when it comes to getting more money out of the tax and ratepayers, our City Manager is as disciplined and humorless as a guillotine engineer. Here is how my question was edited for the camera:
Someone has asked how the City pays for capital improvements.
Despite what I had written on that card, no mention of incurring any possible new bond debt was made. And for the second meeting in a row any hint of a question about new water bonds being issued by the City was left lying on the cutting room floor. Something that leads me to believe that this is a special topic, and as in the case of most special topics there just might be some hard truth to it.
What is left out can have more meaning than what actually gets said. And when that happens twice, and on two separate occasions? I'll let you decide. Personally I believe City Hall is going for it. They are working to put this City another $10 or $20 million in the hole. And my guess is that there are four members of this City Council who will vote to enable that. Including one who ran for office as an anti-tax fiscal hawk.
Which is why we might not have any other real option but to go Prop 218 on them. You either want to save this city, or you don't.
One humorous moment. Bruce Inman made quite a big deal about how the SGVMWD connection with Sierra Madre didn't cost us anything. $2,000,000 was that cost, and it was all paid for by the water district. According to Bruce.
Apparently someone in attendance last night didn't think that could be quite right, and he (or she) handed in a card questioning the source of this $2 million dollars. It turns out it came from money that had been taken from our property taxes. And that the SGVMWD has given us nothing homeowners here didn't already pay for. This was actually owed to us, and has been for quite some time.
We really do need to make some changes in this town.
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