To my amazement, I see where our mayor and his local minions are now doing their best to keep growing the bureaucracy and budget of our local city government. That was the main issue they pillared the former mayor and city council people for in their so-called election theme.
Remember the pictures in front of the Christmas decorations that then candidate Joven lambasted folks for putting up downtown and spending $50,000 on frivolous gestures like that? Well $50,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the fiascos in just the last two months.
Hiring a city manager with a $300,000 per year search firm that A) had never done a city manager search before and B) brought forward a guy that had zero experience for another $250,000 per year. What’s that $550,000 in two months wasted?
Have you seen where the council just passed a tax hike for all Odessans for next year? And the kicker was this last Tuesday when the mayor and his 3 council proxies in their infinite wisdom think they can run the entire economic development department and initiative better and more economically than the Odessa Chamber of Commerce.
The same agency that has been doing this for over 27 years with zero issues and billions of dollars of investment recruited into Odessa and Ector County. I was on the original city council that passed the economic development sales tax back in the late 90’s.
We purposefully decided to keep that entity out of the city bureaucracy because it needed to work on its own – not with elected officials trying to stick their uninformed noses into the mix. We needed people that had business sense or a track record of employing people or recruiting folks in.
That’s not for the mayor and council to do as they have way too many other important local issues to deal with. But now they think they have the time and expertise to do so. What a crock.
Well maybe just maybe their newly hired city manager can help them with all the vast leadership he has in economic development over his years. Wait, upon further review he has zero experience at that either.
Wake up Odessa and vote these folks out at our first chance – before they take our city, we all love, completely down the drain.
PS I am thinking $50,000 sculptures are at least tangible and worth something. The rest of this is total waste!
Kirk Edwards
Odessa
