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Myth vs. Truth The "making it up as you go along campaign strategy" relies heavily upon an uninformed resident population. Please make certain your friends do not fall into this category. This past week I attended one debate and a meet & greet at a private home, both events attended by Frank Ury. We find a lot of fact checking in the Presidential debates, so I thought I would provide my own “Myth vs. Truth” coming from these two events. Myth: Ury claims that the tennis center was not over budget, but that when the council originally looked at the need to update the facility, they decided rather than piecemeal the project, it would be best to do everything needed at once. If they did projects separately, costs would go up the longer they waited to add to the project. Truth: If the myth were true, then why was the budget approved originally for less than $2M, and then changed to $2.7M, and later necessitated 6 change orders including the last change order for just under $500,000 for irrigation and landscaping? If what Mr. Ury said was truth then why did we not have one capital improvement project for $5,000,000? Myth: City Council voted down the Kaleidoscope proposal for electronic billboards and the issue is dead. Truth: City staff was directed by Mayor Ury to bring back to council ideas on updating the city’s sign ordinance. Staff was also instructed to include electronic billboards in the proposal for discussion. Ury and Bucknum both are taking campaign contributions from outside influences (Bucknum $9,000 from one special interest group alone), many desirous of erecting the electronic billboards in order to sell advertising. What can you imagine the expectation of these contributors to be? Here Frank Ury comments to a group of residents during a meet & greet at a resident’s home Saturday October 13th. Myth: He was asked would we have a dog park and if so, when will it be completed? His answer was yes we have the property and we have done a land swap with the country to make it a better site next to the baseball fields. We will have the park completed before the end of summer 2013. Truth: The cost to simply grade out the land is over $850,000. Add in fencing, parking, lighting, irrigation and landscaping and you are close to $2,000,000. I guess that he believes he does not need a council vote to get this done, or he already is so sure of the other two votes that allow him to make this statement. My plan is less than $300,000 for fencing in an existing Mission Viejo park. Myth: The city has $23M in reserves (52%) that we can use for anything we want. Truth: The city reserves are mostly accounted for through encumbrances and assignments to different budgets. In 2007 we had 75% in reserves. When I challenged the mayor on this, he told me those budget assignments are just to keep Sacramento from dipping into our budgets. So the mayor admits to playing games with the budget and he does not take budgeting seriously. It would not take a lot of investigation to notice historical use of our reserves for Sacramento to debunk this budgeting ruse. Visit Ed Sach’s website, http://edsachsformvcitycouncil2012.webs.com/ |
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