CITY COUNCIL TO HOLD WORKSHOP ON UTILITES STUDY, THURSDAY
The Brenham City Council will discuss a study into the cost of city utility services when they meet Thursday afternoon.
The council will hold a workshop session, covering a cost of service study for various city of Brenham utility services and their impact on the water and wastewater fund.
The session will allow the council an opportunity to examine the results of the study that was conducted after city staff found that the majority of the services are either free of charge or considerably lower than the cost of the service.
City staff has recommended phasing-in fee increases over the next three years.
Also, at Thursday’s meeting, the City Council is expected to adopt a new city schedule for the Parks and Recreation Department; adopt an agreement between the city and state concerning Brenham being named a Texas Music Friendly Community; and, adopt rules concerning the receipt of electronic bids or proposals.
Brenham City Council will meet Thursday at 1 p.m. in council chambers at Brenham City Hall.
There is no such thing as a service being provided free of charge by the city. Some city fund has been paying for that service and now to get more revenue those funds have been reallocated. The city now gets to create new fees to make up for the shortfall that they created. This is like being told property taxes aren’t increasing because the tax rate is being kept the same. Every year however, appraisals and therefore property taxes increase. The tax rate is never cut to match increased appraisals. This city is strapped for cash and instead of tightening up the budget during the current economic hardship city council continues to rubber stamp everything city managment requests.
Every time the city of Brenham gets a new senior city manager or a new junior city manager, this automatically results in cost increases for city services. The mayor hires these managers from ten buck two and the managers just want to increase the cost of living. Well, I got news for you new managers on the block. Just because you got hired on for your hundred plus thousand dollars a year don’t mean everybody else in Brenham is making that kind of dough. Looks like the citizens are overpaying city top brass employees. And then they need to raise our costs to cover their pampered paychecks. If this keeps up, I’ll need to come out of retirement and get me a junior city manager job.
It is bad when all of these outsiders move into local city management positions and the lifelong residents are forced to pay for these ridicules things that we never had before and then have to pay the people that are in charge too. It is hard enough already to pay the bills on a fixed income.