T or C audit for fiscal year 2024, some thoughts
It was a banner year for gross receipts tax revenues, which nicely fattened the bottom line. Lean years behind and ahead though.
Category Analyses
What you need to know, April 16, 2025: Public Lands?
Our President has created a "sovereign wealth fund," which considers all government holdings as assets, investments for return of capital. This business enterprise immediately turns the federal holdings from their original purpose of public service into assets to be used to make money. Public land is now an asset.
Downtown drainage plan–hard, unimaginative, anti-environment
"Green" infrastructure is the thing forward-thinking cities put in to address storm-water runoff. Nowhere in sight in T or C's master downtown drainage plan.
Trump’s targeting of immigrants prompts classical music quartet to cancel performance at downtown T or C venue
Trump's disdain for the woke and immigrants, in combination with his professed unlimited executive powers, has unleashed ICE to target dissidents, intellectuals, artists, scientists, educators and journalists. Border Patrol check stations are to be avoided.
Where has the G. O. bond money gone so far and where will it go? The answer is complicated
Spending the $3 million in bond revenues, to be done right--to leverage grant and loan money by providing required cash matches the city wouldn't have on hand otherwise--requires a lot of planning and coordination.
Musk Chainsaw V: Writing or rewriting history
The godfather has two godsons: Elon Musk, his court jester, and JD Vance, his thinker. Together, they give the godfather the appearance of majestic distance as they replace the state nationally and internationally with a corporate business. Today, I look at an Executive Order teaching us to think corporately.
“Road Diet” in downtown T or C is a misnomer for elaborate pictogram that must be decoded while driving
Could our city commission make it any harder to drive the I-25 business loop? First the three-ring-circus roundabouts and now a “road diet” obstacle course downtown.
What you need to know, March 24, 2025: Medicare and Medicare Advantage coming up.
I am posting a link to an article on why we have Medicare, how private health insurance attacked Medicare, how Medicare Advantage turned Medicare into private profit at the expense of patient health, and the probable end of Medicare under its new director. I add my opinionated comments
Don’t call them tiny homes
Want to put a single-family dwelling less than 500 square feet on your lot? The city commission just made it a lot easier, even though it's not allowed in city code.
Water report : “losing 35 to 40 percent compared to 59 percent this time last year”
Hooray for concise and honest reporting by new interim water department supervisor, Jamie Foreman, as scary as the stats are.
Musk Chainsaw II: Isleta Pueblo sues the Bureau of Indian Affairs over firings
This posting continues my analysis of the federal government's cost cutting actions by looking at the harm done to two native American universities and their students as a result of indiscriminate and across-the-board firings of staff that threaten their accreditations as universities.
T or C applying for $190,000 grant/loan to do preliminary engineering study on whole wastewater system
With Trump cutting federal funding, T or C's usual go-to source, Colonias funding, may dry up. What if we have to pay for critical repairs ourselves, with no grant money?