Councilman unloads at City Hall

You young people are free to skip this story and go to the city of Mt. Pleasant on You Tube, straight to the video. Click on the September 15 council meeting. Skip the first three hours.
The action starts at 3:23:12 where Rookie Councilman Galen Adams calls out Facebook’s Annie Johnson – “if you exist,”– then launches into a 39-point recap of the first year of a new administration, dropping numbers like bombs.

“Enough’s enough,” said Councilman Adams, half of the Mt. Pleasant Burgers and Fries management team that gambled something north of $3,000 in his winning bid for a $25-a-month council seat that in August kept him working nights boning up on city books while searching creation in hopes of finding Facebook Annie.
“I want to put this out there,” Councilman Adams said, opening the highlight reel with a challenge. “If Annie Johnson does really exist and wants to have a conversation, I’m available for a meeting at city hall.”
It was summer when Facebook Annie emerged, calling for City Manager Ed Thatcher’s head on a platter. Sizzling posts revealed her as a girl hip to city hall, in touch with the dark side, but also a fun loving girl, breezy and light hearted in the caption beneath her photo from the Florida beach.
“My gorgeous view for the week!” she captioned the shot. “Hello Destin!”
She seemed such a caring woman.
“This is my whole world in one photo!” she wrote to caption the shot of a fine looking man laughing with two children riding a roller coaster, a moment perfectly captured, killer shot.
Speaking from the counter of Burgers and Fries before opening, while wife Darla called up evidence from cyberspace, Councilman Adams said, “Annie’s beach picture came off the website of the Henderson Park Inn there in Destin.”
“That address is 2700 Scenic Highway 98,” Darla added, backing the councilman’s claim with the same shot Annie’s got – or had – on the hotel’s reservation link. Darla had it up on the laptop. Elect him, get her, apparently a package deal when push comes to shove.
The photograph of Annie’s “whole world” in a single frame can also be found in cyberspace in the twitter account of a Metroplex elected official.
“I have contacted several of this person’s Facebook friends,” Councilman Adams said. He’s found nobody who knows Annie.
Could it be that Facebook Annie emerged from the wake of the dismissals or retirements of a city manager, a police chief, a pair of Main Street managers plus two department heads during the first year of the Thatcher Administration?

Backed by the You Tube clip on record for anybody, the trigger for the business brain that campaigned on fiscal accountability to unload on city hall was rising to the defense of Ed Thatcher. In August, copies of the local weekly with a six column top of the front page headline advancing an ex-employee allegation of sexual harassment appeared on the doorstep of the city manager’s home church.
Clippings have arrived in anonymous mailings to towns where Ed and Deb Thatcher’s six sons live.
Answering a ghost, Councilman Adams said: “As for Ed Thatcher, we have a completed investigation. The accusations are not true . . .” (This report leaves out the number of the law office the councilman provides for anybody with more questions. If you really want it, go to the tape.)
A couple of weeks after the council meeting, Facebook Annie evaporated, vanished, lost in cyberspace. So let’s get to the dull stuff that kept the Councilman Adams team working overtime to create the 39-point council chamber number bomb report.
In summary, the new business manager went back five years to find a point at which the city books balanced, dodging a ricochet shot left over from the firm that reported – on page 63 of the last Ahren’s era fiscal year audit – that it wouldn’t work for the city again without end of the year numbers in books provided on time.
That’s the big one, validating the Adams opinion that the town hasn’t been running like a hamburger store where the bottom line keeps Mrs. Adams in her Corvette of choice while leaving discretionary funds to run for an office friends told him would cost him business.

“Hasn’t yet,” Councilman Adams said. Common sense pulls ahead by a nose. Voters aren’t just out there sending their checks in.
Bookkeeping picked up a $25,000 savings by paying some insurance premiums in advance, then found some city money on deposit that the bank agreed should have been drawing interest, so they did; a guy named Larry McGuffin, a retired Metroplex city administrator Ed Thatcher knew from his 40-odd years in city management – mostly in Texas – so McGuffin retired and created his own company. Working for a cut of whatever he finds that’s been left on the table, U.S. Energy Audit Services put some $160,000 back in the city treasury.

Here’s another one: The city collected $250,000 in unpaid “franchise fees,” something to do with a failure to notify Newly Wed Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride they’d been annexed, years ago.
They negotiated. The quarter of a million settlement was “a six month portion” of fees left uncollected for years, said Councilman Adams, going on and on about money. See it all on you tube.

Meanwhile, out on the street, arriving new as a newly-combined Parks Department and Main Street Director with oversight of a Civic Center, Ricky Harris looked at his books, ran some numbers, made some calls and relied on Clear View, a home grown contractor that in seven working days cleared the jungle at Jurney Park on the northwest corner of Quillie and East 4th, revealing bridges over a ravine where a once-planned biking trail fell through the cracks years back. What’s left is a mixed hardwood forest you can see through the trees.

“Parks people in the suburbs dream of a deal like this,” Mr. Harris said.