Date: 5/22/2011, 11:25 pm
Name: Shadow Rules
If the Waddler is gone the Shadow was the key. If Henry says she was tough talking and no nonsense director, Shadow tells the real story leading to her demise. Boyd was an inside under the raidar grifter. Add her to the Downtown Clown, Old Mayor, Richenberg and Ratkowski. Can't wait to see who is next! I vote Dog Hogson gets exposed to the light of truth.
Date: 5/21/2011, 7:30 am
Name: 4 596
Call That's Amore Chad and Boy-Mayor Adam for filching $20K in tax $$ for themselves. Not very original.
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Thank you, enjoy your visit and come back ya' heah.
May 23, 2011
DEAR PAM
We realize that many City officials have limited resources available for pursuing cost reduction projects, so we have decided to help them and provide draft letters for review. This will free them up for important things, like dealing with all the serious problems of the police and fire department pensions.
NOTES
1. GATEWAY TO NOWHERE
A couple of hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money to attract tourists on US Rt. 1 to turn onto Canal. Locals are on RT. 1, tourists come in off I-95 and over the Martin Luther Bridge heading for the Beach. If you want tourists to go to Canal, jazz up Palmetto or Live Oak with bigger signs on Lyttle.
2. CROWDS
There seems to be no logic nor any credibility to the question of attendance or participation in events for City sponsored events. Years ago the County claimed huge crowds on the New Smyrna Beach despite City’s projections that the crowds were only half as large. A count of the number of people per vehicle who paid for beach parking came up with an average the Shadow is told of less than half of the County’s projection. It is interesting that the weekend total of visitors to the beach by the County was put at 30,000 whereas the real number was way less than 15,000 beachgoers on the best weekend. The recent creative juices were really pumping when they grossly over estimated the number of those who attended the balloon fiasco.
3. THE BEACH
If you really are interested in why people come to New Smyrna Beach, go look at our Beach today. Wide and smooth. Simply beautiful. Worth the trip, particularly on a balmy day with a small breeze. A picture of one of the best beaches in Florida is what you would expect to be on the cover of the Chamber brochure. Instead it is hot air balloons which is what you would expect to see on the Albuquerque Chamber’s brochure, where they have a real balloon fest with REAL crowds.
1. FREE ADVICE
HOW THE CITY CAN SAVE A FEW MILLION DOLARS IN THE CURRENT BUDGET
We will not charge the City a dime for this report.
A.$825,000. Abolish the phony position of Lieutenant at the fire department and reduce the number of personnel per shift to two. The lieutenants are “managers” in name only- they are members of the Union and the title is an excuse to pay them more. [Read More by Clicking Here ]
B. $150,000. Make the current Fire Chief the Director of Public Safety. Port Orange just created that position and abolished the position of Fire Chief as it named the Police Chief to the new position. Cost of salary and benefits for current Police Chief is saved
Dear Mayor Barringer,
I thought it was pretty cool that we got the reporter from the Journal to give us a great boost with the editorial writer. It is simply untrue that we threatened to withdraw our legal notices if they refused to be nice to me. You know I would not do anything like that. Besides, we can not throw money to the Observer anymore since it closed its office in town and can hardly be called a “newspaper of general distribution”. But then again, it never could.
PAM
C. $240,000. Negotiate the fire department contract to require an 8% contribution to thepension plan or a 6% reduction in pay. Port Orange, in a Court proceeding on its 2008 fire department contract, has won the Court case sanctioning this approach and we could have done it two years ago and saved even more as Port Orange was still negotiating their 2008 contract ;
D. $176,000. Convert the Police Department to a calls for service workload based service rather than a zone system. And use REAL CALLS , NOT JUST CLICKS ON THE LAPTOP IN THE CAR. It is not necessary to have the same number of police on the street on a Sunday morning as on Saturday night;
E. $45,000 . No take home cars. Or at least no cars that leave the City if the idea is to use off duty policeman as a reserve. Or charge them 51 cents a mile, the current IRS approved rate;
F. $150,000. Collect a fair rent from the Angler’s Club. Send them a $150,000 bill as the value of the slips and make them sue if they do not care to pay;
G. $ 200,000. Sell the municipal golf course or at least lease it to someone who will phase out the City subsidy;
H. $24,000. Charge the Chamber of Commerce a fair rent for the building on Canal. At least charge them what they are paying Bob Garriques (former Chamber President and recently a front for Steve Dennis) for the place they pay for on Julia ($3,600);
I. $322,000. Offer the Director of Parks and Recreation a contract for $50,000 (half her current salary of $100,000). Contract out the job of greens keeper at the Municipal Golf Course (current salary of $70,000) to a golf management company for a $30,000 consultant (no benefits). Terminate current City Attorney and hire replacement for $75,000 (saves $220,000, plus fringe);
J. $1,500,000. Forget the nonsense of building the new fire station around the corner from a functioning County station.
This is just a start. We are talking about millions, not the piddling hundreds of thousands that they paid a consultant $40,000 to hear about.
2. BUDGET REVIEW
The Shadow intends to visit the City of New Smyrna Beach budget in select issues from now until they adopt the final budget at the end of the summer. We thought that it would be good to start with the police department.
Five Things Wrong with the NSB Police Department Management and Budget
1.There still are too many Chiefs in relationship to the Indians. We have a Chief, two Commanders, two Lieutenants, and around 5 Sergeants providing leadership and command to about 34 police officers; that equates to one leader for every 3.4 workers. The national norm is about 7 workers to one supervisor.
2.There is no way to evaluate performance as the department’s goals and objectives are several years old and do not include any quantifiable measures.
3.The necessity for maintaining a SWAT team is questionable and its operations are expensive in terms of both training time and equipment. The liability issues surrounding deployment are enormous and are not justified by the level of need considering the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office has a perfectly capable team that does not need either the augmentation from NSB or our funding to operate.
4.The requirement for a motorcycle unit, and its attendant expensive equipment and high injury rate, is not justified by any quantifiable measure. Nor does there seem to be any evaluation of effectiveness of any claimed selective traffic enforcement operations.
5.The current take home car program does not provide any measurable benefit to the citizens of NSB as 80% (40/50) of the vehicles leave the city limits at the end of each shift, thus providing no visible deterrent or ability to provide backup to on-duty NSB officers.
And we have not even touched on the pension, overtime, leadership, and communications issues that are also part of the problem. Look for our in-depth analysis of the current and (when issued) proposed NSB police budget in a future issue of the NSB Shadow. That analysis will include a question checklist you can take to the City Commission Budget Review meetings scheduled for this July. Yes, the meetings they schedule in July when most are on vacation and during the day when those who are not, are working. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
Future issues on the budget review
FIRE DEPARTMENT, PUBLIC WORKS, PARKS AND RECREATION, PLANNING, ZONING, PERMITS, AND INSPECTIONS, CITY ATTORNEY, INFASTRUCTURE,
And More……
3. HOW A NEWSPAPER CAN SAVE MONEY AND STILL BE RELEVANT
Last Tuesday the Daytona Beach News Journal ran an editorial lauding the City of New Smyrna Beach for having a management consultant They said they got it at a bargain basement cost of only $40,000 and the management report advises the City how to save $275,000. The Shadow thought this was an outrageous expenditure for public funds , including that is what our expensive management team is supposed to provide. [Click for the Report]
In its issue published on last Monday the Shadow so stated and considers the editorial published by the Journal as an effort to rehabilitate local management. The Journal editorial even commended the consultant for asking the current employees for advice as to how to save money. WOW, who would believe that one should ask the employees for advice! What an innovative idea in 2011.
If the Journal editorial writers had read the management report they would have seen that it castigated the current City management and gave it failing grades on almost every criteria used. What it says is that the City is doing nothing right from a management standpoint and that the waste and inefficiencies lie with both the current and past City management. Most glaring is the statement that 30 years after the introduction of integrated computer management systems the City has not introduced this elemental tool. The City relies on paper based Excel spreadsheets throughout its departments.
The Shadow considers the Journal editorial as at best misguided. If we remember correctly the Journal was sold at what was effectively a fire sale because of its dire financial position only about a year ago. We certainly want to keep the Journal around if for nothing other than the sports and comics. Understand, therefore, that while the Shadow is in the business of commentary on the political foibles on the local political scene, it feels obligated at this point to supply a sister paper with advice as to how to save a boodle of money and be more relevant to its local readers in New Smyrna Beach. The Shadow believes both objectives are desirable.
Our gratuitous suggestions:
A. First, if all an assigned local reporter does is submit handouts distributed by the entity he is covering, have the City send the handouts directly to the Editor in Chief and save the local reporter’s salary. Use him else where if you must, like investigating the Oak Hill police department;
B. Secondly, change the process where the Journal never runs a story on any of the problems that touch on the entitlement mentality that infests New Smyrna Beach. Start with the canal dredging proposal, the taxpayers’ money that paid for the Balloon fiasco, the $20,000 CRA grant to the Mayor’s friend and that the Mayor’s brother has the contract to spend the money, or the fact that the Angler’s Club still has a $25 lease for the most expensive Marine slips in town. If you are careful to never comment on anything important, you will keep open the lucrative placement for the City’s legal notices . The price, however, is not doing the newspaper’s role of ferreting out fraud, waste and abuse. If you covered these issues the Journal might sell more papers ;
C. Third, since there is a need to cut back on expenses, hire another newspaper to advise the Managing editor how to to do his job and save money. The cost would probably be about $40,000.Tagging on to say a Hearst contract for management contract would be a way to save some of the consultant fee; and
D. Fourth, market the unused capacity for the printing press to the New York Times , Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal since they actually do investigative reporting and are worth reading .
If we have any other thoughts we will let you know next week.
A STATEMENT BY THE SHADOW
The Shadow generally does not edit BLOGS. Very profane comments, even in only first letters, and attacks accusing anyone of a crime are deleted or reformed even when they are about public officials. Personal attacks upon the publisher that are devoid of content are deleted. But not always. Not all postings are essays on important subjects. Not all are fully cogent. On the real positive side, there are way more than 100,000 postings over the last few years and many are excellent tip offs as to funny goings on in Mayberry. Many also are excellent essays on relevant topics. Do our readers a favor and stop attacking the opposing political party as commies or reactionaries. The Shadow does edit for spelling.
1. INVESTIGATVE REPORTING
Not all of the Daytona Beach News Journal coverage of New Smyrna Beach is bad. The Journal has been doing a fair job recently on covering Bert Fish and the County Council meetings. The reporters are not the one who usually does the local news here.
A few recent factoids from the articles on Bert Fish: Bert Fish legal bills for this year will be close to $2 ½ million; shortfall for indigent fund will exceed $1 ½ million.
Credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately, the Hometown News seems to mimic for the most part the tactic of the News Journal local reporter and only prints handouts from the City. The Shadow was thinking about doing a series on failed police departments in Southeast Volusia, but decided instead to review the New Smyrna Beach budget.
2. THE ADDED BENEFIT OF THE MURPHY GAS STATION ON SR.44
Last week Murphy ‘s was selling gasoline regular for $3.73 cents, which was 14 cents cheaper than a number of stations on US Rt. 1. Assuming that there were 1000 fill ups of only 10 gallons each, that is $1.40 per car or $1,400 per day X 352=more than $700,000. Assuming that the other distributors will lower their prices, and some already have, we think that this one station will be responsible for leaving in your wallet over a million dollars for you to spend.
3. The Shadow has a new interim email address, nsbshadowteam@gmail.com. we encourage you to submit articles and information that you want the Shadow to print or act upon to that address. Your submissions will be held in the strictest confidentiality.
BLOGS
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