Councilor Jones (also to be sent to District 8 NA leaders and Coalitions of NA leaders who are likely as concerned)
We now have an APD substation at Montgomery and Tramway that can’t be manned due to lack of funds/officers. We now have an attractive well equipped YMCA on Tramway Boulevard. It is only ¼ mile away from your requested, (but never asked for by anyone in District 8) Holiday Park Multi-Generational Center that you now intend to build.
You have already unilaterally committed much of our tax dollars to SMPC Architects to design this Center without any prior consultation with your District 8 constituents and plan to waste another $8 million in the future to build it. You cared little that nobody even showed up to your recent meeting to discuss this project. We don’t need it now particularly in this poor economy! Just why are you doing it as it is clearly fiscally irresponsible?
I have asked DFCS Director Robin Otten just why this project is still proceeding without the benefit of any DFCS required Center needs analysis? She indicated an unwillingness to challenge you on this-thus allowing the waste to proceed. While preaching to all fiscal responsibility, is the Berry administration merely in a I don’t care mode choosing to defer to the whims of you and many other city councilors who don’t feel you have to justify to anyone just how you spend our tax dollars? You all will be reminded of this on election day-be assured of that.
This Center is much like the $430 million for an equally unneeded, unjustified white elephant Events Center/Hotel/parking garage project in the downtown that you and six others (O’Malley, Benton, Garduno, Sanchez, Cook and Harris) on the Council voted last Monday night to still pursue. You deliberately ignored the fact that no sane private developer prior to 2006 would even take on this very high risk project using its own money.
You also know that the DMD-Mike Riordan-run 2006 procurement process had picked their favored (Ed Adams and Diane Denish-connected) but far more expensive (by $100-175 million more) contractor team to do this job-one whose bid also was based on irresponsible baseless exaggerations of its success.
Yet not surprisingly, that team (DDT-now ABQ66 Center LLC) chose in its bid proposal to commit the least amount of its own money towards this white elephant-and it is a white elephant.
Then adding insult to injury to us taxpayers, in a secret 2008 meeting, your project allies Councilors Benton and O’Malley would have the audacity to approve changing and increasing the RFP scope and allowed cost of that project even more for their favored developer team friends. The Council would in 2008 also give this winning contractor team $700,000 to hire their own consultants to do the important go/no-go economic viability analysis of the project for the City/us taxpayers-something that Ms. O’Malley attempted to portray Monday night as even credible.
This blatant conflict of interest 2008 viability analysis contract award would prompt us citizen attendees at a mid-2008 NM First-sponsored Town Hall Events Center meeting to document our real fears about corruption with this fast tracked downtown project. All of this relevant information was being ignored. It was then of no concern to you and the others that Economic Development Director John Garcia-also seemingly unconcerned with wasting our tax dollars, would then hold secret (closed doors to the public) advisory team meetings to try to justify this wasteful downtown project. His report is not even out yet, yet you and the others supported proceeding with it Monday night.
Like your personal blatantly tax-wasteful new multi-generational center in Holiday Park, choosing to proceed with this Events Center seemingly demonstrates just how arrogant you and the other tax wasters on the Council who voted with you Monday night are. 70% said to you all in a survey last year that they did not want it. You don’t really care what we think! You have to take care of your downtown friends first and foremost.
In another example of misguided priorities, isn’t it also curious that you-with many of these same other councilors had earlier agreed to divert much of the $20 million committed to the important I-25/Paseo interchange to now your own personal pork projects? $8 million of this $20 million would go to a streetscape for MLK Boulevard downtown. Was that decorative project really that urgent? We are already spending/wasting $36 million to decorate just six miles of Lead and Coal.
You and others had even asked for $100 million from the federal government in MR-COG’s 2010 TIP last year for the $30-40 million/mile streetcar. Are you really that out of touch with reality or do you have a blank check from Mayor Berry to continue to waste tons of our tax dollars whenever you wish?
The truth is that you and most of the others really don’t care what your constituents with far more important needs think. It’s your own selfish personal self interests you really care about and this is a demonstration of arrogance at its very worst. Many of us can’t wait until the 2011 and 2015 elections.
TO: Mayor Berry
Do you really care about any of this? If so, just where’s your veto pen?
Disappointed-but not surprised
Silvio
EANA
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