City Council Meetings, What are they Hiding?
Just like a ballgame if you want to know what happened the box score isn’t the same as watching the game live. Yes they decided to put the one cent sales tax on the ballot but that was no surprise. The City Manager and the Mayor’s Cabal have been planning it for over a year while providing raises to everyone in sight that would help them enact this travesty. The reason for the raises? Because it reminds the Fire Department and the MPD that to keep the money flowing they should help push the tax increase. It worked on the anti-sprawl ordinance so they figure it’ll work now.
In 2020 thirty-one Modesto employees made over $300,000 in compensation including the City manager and of course that was before they gave him a $25,000 raise.
The City Manager(CM) and Mayor have gone out of their way to spend our tax money. As one example they refused to get bids for the catering services for Modesto’s Centre Plaza which continues to lose $900,000 every year except this year when we lost $1.8M. As recent as this last Monday the CM laid the groundwork to steal another $213,500 from the Police budget(the majority for his own department) which is something he does on a regular basis. How many Assistant City Managers, Spokespersons and Public Relations people do we really need?
They claim our city salaries need to be higher to attract quality candidates. But when it’s the CM’s Human Resource Manager’s job to recruit do we really think they’re trying as hard as they claim? I mean if they spend the police money on police how can he have any money to buy friends to play with? Many suspect it’s the culture in both the MPD and the City that keep quality people away. But instead of improving the culture we’re forced to overpay for people like we just did for our new City Clerk.
On June 7th at the City Council meeting on an informational report we inquired about several extremely unusual bills that the City had paid. We were required to state our questions and told they’d be answered. So we did. The Mayor decided even though we had the Department heads, the City Manager who had approved the payments, the City Attorney who was responsible for many of the bills available for answers we were refused.
What are they hiding?
One thing for sure is this shows just how badly we need an independent auditor so we can get figures we can trust.
Eye On Modesto 