ON LINE RIP OFF

I am a big fan of the musical group Lady Atnebellum. So when they announced tour date at the 1-800 Ask Gary Amphitheater, I was ready when the tickets went on pre sale last week.

I dutifully logged on, followed all the suggestions, selected my two tickets 56.50 each total $113.00 and hit pay. Amount due $131.00. What? I must have missed something.

I sure did. As I scrolled up there was unwanted $18.00 added for the Lady Antebellum Online Fan Club.

Now I really like Lady Antebellum, but as you might imagine my e-mail box fills up with important stuff from you guys, and I really don't need any more e-mail from people trying to sell groupie junk.

Should be pretty simple, I thought, I'll just delete it and all will be OK. Nope not so fast.

Now I am pretty good at finding carefully tucked away buttons on web sites that allow you to make decisions that the page owner really doesn't want you to make, but I could not find anything that would let me opt out of the online Lady A Fan Club.

Suddenly it was the principle rather than the money or the annoying e-mails. These guys were trying to force me, an on line customer, into an additional $18.00 purchase I did not want.

Not right, not fair, no way I hit delete.     

After cold drink, I calmed down a bit I decided to accept the challenge and try to get the tickets without the Fan Club Option. Figuring it was tied to the on line site I called Live Nation the event promoter 1-800-745-3000.

Here is a confused crowd. First they answer TicketMaster, they bought TickeMaster a while back to get monopoly control of event ticket sales, and when I asked about the Lady A concert they said "the show at the 1-800-Ask Gary Ford Amphitheater"

Smiling, I said "yep that would be the one". I suspect the Ford people are laughing all the way to the bank.

The agent was polite, helpful and within just a few minutes I had the seats I wanted total price $113.00 no fan club and the tickets showed up in my e-mail about 5 minutes later.

The point of all of this is watch your on line buying, and be sure to look at those final prices, then check your credit card to make sure you're not getting ripped off.

This technology that we have all wrapped our lives around can easily be turned against us. Like every other tool we use to make our lives more pleasant and convenient, on line shopping needs to be managed. If they're trying to stiff, you hit delete. There is always another way.

A Search for Pinellas County's Most Important Person

With the departure of interim School Superintendent John Stewart, the Pinellas Country School Board begins, for the fourth time in the last 8 years, a search for a new person to lead the Pinellas County school system.

Here is a group that is almost the poster child for dysfunctional decision making. Especially in the hiring arena. Already they are arguing about who the consultant/recruiter should be. Up for sole consideration FASB ( Florida School Boards Association). Just the name sends shivers up my spine. More in breeding.

This is the crowd that conducted a national search, recommended Alberto Carvalho from Miami Dade, who turned the job down. Probably after one interview with the School Board.

They ended up hiring Julie Janssen.

If after looking statewide, and considering only one recommended candidate; then selecting an in house, under qualified, lack luster manager is the best the Board could do, why would they even think about considering FASB. Maybe the Board just likes to deal with its own kind.

The problem with the School Board is no vision and no courage. It is time to get a first rate national recruiting firm that can bring candidates who want and appreciate the challenge a school system like ours presents. Let's not let the School Board set up another recruitment "failure" and then quickly hire some insider that we have to pay off to get rid of in a couple of years.

Chairwoman Robin Wikle and newest member Glenton Gilzean want to open up the recruiter selection process to completion and that is a great idea. It would be refreshing to follow the rules for a change.

 

e-mail Doc at: dr.webb@verizon.net

County 911 Dispatch for St. Petersburg Police - Why Not?

At the last Budget, Finance and Taxation Committee meeting, Mayor Foster held up a City organization chart and said "this is $199 million organization model, we need a $185 million model."

County administrator Bob LaSala and Sheriff Bob Gualtieri have begun serious talks to consolidate the County emergency center and the Sheriff's 911 center.

The St. Petersburg 911 Center literally duplicates the service performed by the County 911 Center. All 911 calls in Pinellas County go to the County 911 Center. St. Petersburg medical emergency and fire calls are already dispatched by the County Center.

Calls for St. Petersburg Police Service (911) are answered by the County 911 Center and transferred to the St. Pete Center, where they are processed through a call taker and a dispatcher, adding two more people and additional time to the actual Police dispatch. Centralized dispatch should result in better service for the public.

Duplicating 911 call centers has always been a parochial issue, and the City can no longer afford it. There is absolutely no reason to spend millions of dollars on a dispatch center in the new Police building to duplicate something that already exists at the County level ; and continuing to spend millions of operational dollars on Police dispatch when the balance of that money can be turned into on the street police presence.

The cost of the new Police Building is driven as much by the technology as it is by the bricks and mortar. Elimination of a fully functional 911 center and its associated security, environmental requirements and technology infrastructure should reduce the cost of the new Police building significantly.

Now is the time to get the Public safety issue on the Budget radar. The Mayor and City Council must take the lead in developing a new, more efficient and more effective public safety program.

e-mail Doc at: dr.webb@verizon.net

 

 

 

The City Budget Battle is On

It is time for that annual City government exercise called the Budget. In St. Petersburg this year the budget cycle is going to be a bit different. In the last election one of the Charter amendments requires the Mayor to bring a balanced budget to the City Council.

In the past, the administration would bring a budget that was NOT balanced to City Council putting Council in the position of making the painful cuts. It was kind of fun forcing the elected folks to squirm with the painful stuff of budget reductions.

This approach was one of former Council Member Herb Polson's biggest frustrations. He sponsored the Balanced Budget Charter amendment this year, which passed. The administration must bring a balanced budget to City Council, and Council needs to force the Mayor to do just that. No laundry lists, no alternatives - a balanced budget.

The first rough projection (the shock and awe number) is a $10 million shortfall on a $199 million operating budget. That is just about 5%. That $10 million figure is before some significant costs are in, such as healthcare insurance increases, pension increases, utility and other fixed costs that may increase.

The shortfall will likely drop with home sales increasing and sales tax revenue up a bit. The final number should be in 5 to 7 million dollar range. But if any of the unknown costs shoot up, they could soak up the likely revenue increases.

With the departure of new Budget Director Matt Spoor, former Safety Harbor City Manager who left just about as quickly as he was hired, it is unclear who is really running the budget process.

City Administrators, Directors and Managers are a well seasoned group. There are still some here who worked on the Dome. They are, for the most part, very good at what they do. They know how to put together a budget and they know how to build "flexibility" in to those line items.

Whoever manages the Budget process is in for a real challenge as the administration tries to tuck money in and around the normal budget for the Pier, the new Police Building, support for the Rays.

A new person here, a few bucks there so we can do this or that study, few more dollars for marketing, some extra money in Down Town Development all in the budget but off the record and not part of the $50 million cap for the Pier. All of this while trying to cut up to 10 Million from the 2012 budget. Should be intresting.

 

E-mail doc at: dr.webb@verizon.net

The Pier What Happened?

My Post Sunday on the Pier resulted in some comments and some e-mails. These Comments from Linda say a lot. 

 "My perspective is actually that of a tourist, I do not live in St. Pete area, but my parents do and we visit 2-3 times a year. I think the city should really find out what TOURISTS are looking for, also in the pier, because, after all, tourists/visitors/snow-birders contribute largely to Florida's "income."

For those of you new to the whole Pier Process, here is a link  to the Pier Advisory Task Force. This is the outline and these are the people that brought us to this point in the process. The Minutes section of each meeting is a hyper link and you can read how the process unfolded. 

If you take a few minutes and look through this information you will see the amount of effort has gone into the Pier process up to this point and how much input the general public really had.  The question of a public referendum surfaced early and was downplayed from the very start.

So the question is what happened? All of those high end people, a bunch of money for consulting, visioning and planning, a whole raft of meetings how did we end up with the public so upset at the process?

A partial answer may be in the comments by the City's staff architect In a June 8, 2011 article in TBO.com J. Raul Quintana, the city's staff architect, acknowledged that, after all the money spent, the city is no closer to "a visual solution" to The Pier than two years ago. "In a way we're asking the same questions we asked back then," he said.

If you give a bunch of guys with rooms full of computers, egos the size of all outdoors,  that live thousands of miles away from here 50 million dollars to play with, and ask them to design something they can have their name on and not live next to,  you will get what we got. I am not sure what we expected, but we should have expected what we got. 

It is fascinating to listen to the St. Pete elite fawn over these architectural nightmares.  It's kind of like going to a wine tasting and listening  to some gal who showed up in a BMW go on and on about a glass of wine that tastes like the cat took a whizz in it. 

Quintana's comments still stand.

I think the real problem is that there is a group of movers and shakers in St. Pete that have never been happy with who and what St. Pete really is. They think we need a major league team or a monstrosity the water to define us. I think our quality of life defines us.

Look at the names on the Task Force and if you follow things closely a lot of them will look familiar. 

They know what's best for St. Pete and they are not about to be discouraged by letting you vote on their ideas. 

 All they need you to do is pay the tab.

The Pier - Decision Time

There are plenty of comments out there about the proposed new Pier designs. Mine probably wouldn't add much. What we do need to think about now is the process and the impact.

The designs are interesting. It is notable to me that there is not a firm Florida, one that might actually understand our community and environment, that could design the new Pier. I guess they're just not "artsy" enough.

This is a big decision for St. Petersburg. If you haven't noticed, things are not going all that well. The news paper is abandoning the City as a name sake, like it or not it is probably just a matter of time before major league baseball takes their game elsewhere and we were just awarded the dubious distinction of being one of the saddest Cities in the nation.

There are a lot of questions to be asked and answered before the City commits to a project of this scale and impact. There is a fine line between artful attraction and something that becomes a eyesore.

The last thing we need is new Pier that becomes a laughing point, object of bad jokes, or that ultimately ends up on Spa Beach as a tangled mess when the hurricane finally gets here.

We may have been a bit too preoccupied with touting St. Pete as an "ART DESTINATION". I enjoy molded glass and the occasional clock dripping off the edge of a table, but something that is inordinately expensive to build, exorbitantly costly to insure and maintain, that most visitors stand on the shore and laugh at is not where we need to go.

Fifty million is the opening price. That is nowhere near what the final price tag will be if it is anything like the Dome and the International Museum projects.

Add to all of that the effort to prevent the people from actually having an opportunity to vote on what is done at the Pier and you have the makings of a real disaster.

From my perspective the Arts Council, the Chamber of Commerce and a few well connected downtown players have way to much say in this whole process. They don't want you to be able to vote because they know how it will go.

What does West St. Pete get out of this other than a bigger tax bill?

After a long time in the City Administration, I finally figured out the people got it right a lot more often than we did.

The public needs to push hard for a Pier Referendum.