Mis Dos Centavos

On Monday, May 16, 2011, the Lumberton Board of Aldermen will hold a meeting to discuss personnel issues as well as open the bids for the completion of the demolition on Main Street. Today, I will address the latter. There is a lot of money being spent by the City of Lumberton, but it's most being spent outside the City of Lumberton. For instance, whenever the computers crash, they call BBI and spend over $300 to have them repaired. If you're paying over $300 for repairs, wouldn't it be wise to just invest in another computer. I don't know if they are required to use BBI because of the sensitive nature of the information that's on the city's computers or because they are contractually obligated to to use BBI, but there is a perfectly good computer repair store, Wi-Fyze, located on Main Street right here in Lumberton and the last time I had a computer repaired it cost about $75 and I was able to support a local business. The contracts that will be opened Monday will deal with the completion of the demolition of the building on Main Street. The grant writers "found" some additional funding to include this in the grant project, but again, this is not bringing any revenue to the City of Lumberton. I am certain that the company that's awarded the bid will bring in their own crew and no one from Lumberton will be hired to work on the project. Again, if additional monies was found in the grant, why wouldn't the board of aldermen look for a way to bring in and/or hire some people from Lumberton to work on the project; at least they would be able to say that they helped to bring jobs to Lumberton. Another thing that's been on my mind this week is the amount of time our garbage trucks spend on the streets of Lumbeton. When Danny Davis was Director of the Public Works Department, you would see the truck running three or four days out of the week. Now, the truck is running at least five days a week. That means that the City of Lumberton is paying an average of $38-40/per hour(the combined wages of the three crewmen riding in the truck) for our garbage truck to be driven around the city almost everyday and that's not including the gas and maintenance for the truck. (Note: to the person that will call up the garbage crew and tell them what I blogged about, make sure to tell them the full story this time.) But I guess the public works department is not under the same scrutiny as the police department when it comes to their fuelman cards. Since the City of Lumberton is always saying they need to find a way to save money, I have a suggestion. The aldermen should make the garbage crew auxiliary police officers since they patrol the city more than the police officers.