The Consent Calendar was approved with a vote of 5-0. With that came the following: Gary Thornhill as interim City Manager, Chief Brown as our new Fire Chief (no longer interim), and Tami Wilhelm was appointed to the Planning Commission. Last I knew, Tami Wilhelm lived in county.
For those of you who thought Jeff Stone didn't care about destroying our city any further after his recent election to State Senate, do yourselves and continue to pay attention. I wonder if you will still agree. For those of you knowledgeable in politics 101, well, you knew better.
Gary Thornhill, yes the same guy from before, is now our Interim City Manager; a step-up from his last job here in Hemet. He lives in Temecula (Please read his contract. You may find parts interesting. It is in the full agenda.). As we all know, he was involved in the last contracting-out agenda. What I want to know is... why is he back? Supposedly, we have a new council majority. They got rid of Hill to bring in Thornhill for at least six months. Does that make any sense? I agree, that he is smarter than Hill. However, we know his intentions. So council majority; you got some explaining to do unless you feel we are not privy to that information. A mutual feeling you would then share with the last council majority. I actually went a step further on this and asked people with a psych background why they might go in this direction. In all honesty, I was trying to genuinely understand where they might be coming from. The response was... It's familiar, quick and didn't require a lot of work on their part. Make your own assessment.
The difference this time is that the council majority and Vail have an intense desire to contract out our water department. This idea started, that we know of, about a year ago. Council already voted to raise rates a couple meetings back. If we contract out, are those rates going to go up or down? :-) We all know they will go up. Here is how they plan on justifying the consultant- we need to conserve water and we are not sure if we are doing everything we can do to do that because we have nothing to compare it to, so let's see if we can look at other companies and compare. Prepare yourselves for a vote to approve a consultant to come in and evaluate for the approximate price tag of $80,000. If we are going to go off prior decisions, I guess I should say first consultant.
Raver suggested waiting for the new city manager to discuss this topic at a council meeting because he is quite knowledgeable in this department. I don't know if Raver is going to try to mentally spar with him but for this suggestion to come from someone who supposedly has no interest in contracting out because rates will increase- it was interesting.
Is anyone else tired of this yet?
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