From Steve Hanken
...a ‘Letter from Iowans’ submission
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Living in a town of 4,000 (Monticello, Iowa) and moving here from Cedar Rapids 8 years ago, I have become obsessed with how this city does its business. Having a local paper that makes available ‘Letters to the Editor’ allows me to hone my arguments and suggest changes that should be obvious.
After 37 years as a homeowner in Cedar Rapids, I learned valuable lessons about property taxes and assessments. My neighbors were happy the city thought so much of their property that seemingly when their assessments went up, they assumed that the value of their property also went up! I fought every increase and, more often than not, won! I bring that same logic to Monticello, but the spendthrifts here seem not to understand a budget, nor do they have any idea of strategic planning.
Their council meetings are a circus, and they refuse to operate starting with "old business" first, followed by "new business," and covering every item till it is completed. So they turned over the planning for a new sewer plant to the engineers - required by the state - and ignored the process.
After five years, one would have thought they might notice! Our 5-7 million dollar sewer plant price kept climbing, and when the final plan came out, it still wasn't to specifications with the state’s requirements that the plant had to be in a 500-year floodplain, and all of the work had to be inspected by an engineer.
The inspection portion increased the cost by around $200,000! So after getting what money we could from the state for the project, the bids came in between $5 and $7 million over the projected cost of $19mm! We have two years to build this plant according to the timeline established by the state, and we can't spend over the allotted money, or we lose that!
The decision now is to wait and rebid it in the fall! At the moment, I am expecting the water and sewer bills to start going through the roof to pay for this project that should have already been completed by now for much less. However, we haven't turned even the first shovel of dirt, and if we wait till the fall to rebid this project, does it have anywhere to go but up? Worse, we are running out of time to complete the project!
So, this is my bailiwick! Letters to the Editor.
Steve Hanken
Former farm boy, Vietnam Veteran and World traveler. Raising Hell in small town Iowa.I've done lots of things in my past, all very forgettable and useless except for an obituary that pumps more hot air than Trump, Steve
Do you want more information? http://www.ci.monticello.ia.us/public-works/
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Since last I wrote this piece, we have gone through yet another bidding process, and of course it is lower, but that certainly doesn't take into consideration change orders! Almost from the very first, this became a reality when they started to do the excavation work and found the area they were going to build on was filled with old tires buried beneath the ground surface! Part of this property had once been a race track, so was it any surprise that tires might have been buried there? We will never know, but we do know that instantly a change order was written to add even more to the bid! By the time the plant is finished I fully expect the cost will be no lower than the original bid and the only thing they gained was a completion date even later than it originally was expected.
Welcome to our Letters column, Steve!