City Hall Elevator Rumblings #24
Rider #1: Can you believe what the council is actually considering? After all the years of coddling and voting in favor of anything McDougal, they are considering a severing of his financial umbilical cord with the city. Is election time around the corner? Did someone steal the council’s Kool-Aid supply?
Rider #2: I’ll believe it when I see it. Citizens have been dogging the council for years about McDougals lack of performance and his socking away enormous consulting fees and commissions. Using spin and excuses, the council and city manager continuously protected a flawed deal. If they do boot McDougal back to Lubbock, there still remains one major problem for the council and city manager to overcome.
Rider #1: What is that?
Rider #2: How is the council and city manager going to explain to the public that the city will assume a $27 million bank note and undertake property that may be worth about $7 million? (Aggie math calculates this could be about a $20 million hickey saddled on the tax payer’s back.) And if that wasn’t bad enough, McDougal wants to be ‘made whole’ and reimbursed $80,000 for some design expenses and around $2.6 million for personal property that he purchased not utilizing the city’s line of credit.
Rider #1: Are you kidding me? The guy hasn’t delivered what he contracted to do and wants to be rewarded for his lack of performance? I would tell him to hold on to his personal and overpriced ‘investment’ property until the old downtown is developed to the point where he could sell it.
Rider #2: Here’s what I think. If all the folks who drew up the original contract with McDougal, voted to approve it, or monitored the progress over the last several years worked in the real world, they would now be looking for a ‘shovel ready’ job. Guess this is what happens when the Lubbock Mafia and easily swayed, Kool-Aid sipping elected officials venture into the world of spin and hype with slick developers. (Does this tune sound familiar? Try humming the Billy Bob Boondoggle anthem.)
Rider #1: Once the council and city manager purge Irving’s slate, they may want to hire on as consultants for Lubbock’s downtown project. The following article in the Lubbock paper reflects that McDougal is attempting to crank up a venture similar to Irvings!
http://lubbockonline.com/local-news/2011-11-15/plan-envisions-lubbock-downtown-cool-place#.Ts5YTmA5uKs
A note from counsel: These “candid” elevator conversations have been injected with fabricated nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, adverbs, modifiers and maybe a few dangling participles….Mark Holbrook
