Lack of Accountability.

The more I find out how the City does business, the more I am convinced that they just don't know what they should be doing.

Candidates can ask the City questions and get official answers. Below are some links to the responses from the City. The responses can be shocking to those who read what is being said, as well as what it means.

The City is spending almost $150,000/year on the Business Ombudsman, yet according to the City they don't keep track of how many businesses have been helped. So how exactly do they determined if this money is being wasted? I suspect that the only answer for this is that they really don't care.

The second glaring issue is in regards to the TMD (Tourist Marketing District). It seems that the Council is just doing the will of some hotels, when the hotels could actually do it themselves, but then they would have to either raise the room rates or take it out of their profits. Instead, they can advertise a lower rate (excluding taxes), and the person only sees the tax when they check out, which hides this tax.

The next aspect with this is that while this was passed in July 2014, the Council has not been bothered to come up with a contract or an agreement and the City says that they may talk about it in the future. So the City creates a new tax which is said to bring in around $230,000/year and they have not come up with a contract yet. A reasonable Council would not pass such a tax until the contract/agreement was determined. What happens if an acceptable contract/agreement never gets approved?

The next aspect that the Council does not get is how to determine if it is sucessful or not. It seems clear that they don't seem to care. It is claimed that success is based on increased room occupancy and they claim that any increase in an increase in the number room nights has been correlated to the TMD. Really? So if the economy picks up and there is more business, not tourist, travel, then the TMD is working. If people hold a family reunion and the room occupancy increases, then it means that the TMD is working. I really don't think that the City understands what the word "correlated" means.