rialtonow

Wednesday August 8th at 6 pm Council members Scott and Trujillo held a non public meeting to address the recommendations sent to city council from the Budget Advisory Committee. Councilman Scott spoke about not being prepared to address an already overdo 2018-2019 budget that began July 1st of this year. Over and over Ed Scott proved who he was aligned with the Police and to a lesser extent the Fire Department.

Over and over Mr Scott made city staff out to be people who lied on a regular basis and kept information from him and the Budget Advisory Committee. It became clear in the meeting that a 8% 2 year retro pay raise PLUS an 8% raise for Police was appropriate in Mr Scotts eyes. Even though the city was starring down the barrel of massive debt to bloated employee pensions plus continued poor judgement in picking people to contract with in the city Mr Scott said the Police deserve a very high raise.

Budget Advisory Committee member Joe Rayden tried to show Mr Scott the error of this massive raise looking back to staff report that said at 3% the city would find itself deeper in debt so 8% would speed up the cities ultimate failure to meet financial obligations it did no good. Mr Scott barked at anyone that would even hint at the Police raise being a bad idea.

Many wonder where Councilman Scott and Trujillo were planning to get the money a little over 2 million in total to cover just this one raise? Looks like the two councilmen are looking at cutting Capital Improvement projects in the north end of the city. One project Ed Scott has on the chopping block is the $1.05 Million set aside since 2015 for additional community gardens in the north end of town. Those who don’t know it there are ZERO fresh food options available north of baseline also with home lots becoming more and more dense home gardens are becoming less available. When Mr Scott was asked why not fire the employees that lie and fail to move projects along he failed to respond.

Other projects that Councilman Scott is looking at adding to the trash bin is a planned park in the new north end development, one that the city told builder Lewis that we would build. We have already spent some of the money that Lewis gave to construct the new park in the Renaissance Marketplace Area and the city has some sort of agreed obligation to begin building the park once Lewis begins building the homes.

Also the Budget Advisory Committee wanted more accountability in regards to travel. The recommendation was that anyone wishing to travel on the cities dime out of the $100 thousand a year that the city council spends on travel the person would pay for the travel, give a brief written report about what taxpayers got out of this trip then they would be reimbursed. This would save money because less people would travel just to get a free trip on the taxpayers dime. Ed Scott said it wouldn’t save money because you would have to hire a special person to write his report because he is a legislative person and doesn’t write his own reports!!!!!!

Councilman Trujillo sat there never really said much and I was unsure if he even knew why he was there.

The final kicker was when I asked Pam Kennedy the council administrative assistant if this meeting was going to be open to the public.

David – Is this meeting going to be a public meeting?