Nepotism requires that city staff pretend the city is an equal opportunity employer while muzzling criticism of leaders. Real talk about the mayor's relations and their fitness to hold their city positions is a fireable offense.
Local and state cooperation will be key in delivering help and recovering from disaster–and a brand new hazard mitigation plan lays out what’s needed.
A new airport layout plan is needed, but nearly $600,000 worth? Why spend time and money on future growth and development if there is no water out there and new water appropriations are limited due to a closed basin? Shouldn't water availability be studied first?
The city commission hasn't bothered to pass an ordinance on tiny homes. Now it's granted an owner a variance to have one in the special Riverside neighborhood, making zero findings of fact, leaving the field wide open for others who want a tiny home.
Lewis Carroll's search for the snark---sailing across the ocean with a blank map in pursuit of what may be illusory--is similar to the city budget and its blank underpinnings and deficit spending. Yet talk of expansion is rife. The city commission evidently believes in snarks.
Serious governance and fiscal oversight is still taking a back seat to chasing "quality of life" projects.
Is the over $5 million to be transferred out of the utilities, as proposed in the interim budget, to pay for "bread and circuses?" Yes. But in what proportion? In ancient Roman senators' flagrancy, as Juvenal satirized?
What the city's future and functionality will be rests largely in the ICIP process. The city needs to up its game in this area to include harnessing the community's support and power. City Manager Gary Whitehead already has game, thank goodness.
The Village only had one audit finding according to its at-arms-length auditor, Southwest Accounting Solutions of Albuquerque, but I preferred to use Truth in Accounting's evaluation method. The Village earned a good grade from them too.
Would you rather hear the brutal truth about city finances from a Dutch uncle or get the usual easy-A report from a lax teacher? The former makes the city think about its future and the latter makes it easy to rack up debt.
I don't blame Villagers for not participating in the Infrastructure Capital Improvements Project. The meeting time was changed, you couldn't write in suggestions to the Village clerk, there was only one public hearing and it was only 30 minutes long. Getting the "why" out of trustees' ICIP choices was hard.
Asset management plans are boring. Camelot dreams are not. We are still basing our choice of capital projects on "wouldn't it be nice" instead of "what is the state of our assets."