cross your fingers for emergencies
tommy permalink | categories: city, county, health, law enforcement, tax waste, taxesby tommy @ 8:51 am
Last Sunday’s big story in the Tribune was about uninspected fire hydrants.
collecting hydrant maintenance fees of about half a million dollars annually, the Tampa Water Department hasn’t inspected some hydrants in as many as five years - a violation of not only city standards but state law.
Those Trib editors must be prophets. On Thursday, the lead story was about a failed fire hydrant.
At any rate, hydrants should be inspected year, and the Fire Department pays the City of Tampa Water Department to inspect each of them. TWD gets $40 per year for each of the city’s 9,000+ hydrants in city limits - over $360,000/year. In addition, Hillsborough County pays TWD $60 to inspect and maintain about 3,700 hydrants in unincorporated Hillsborough - over $220,000. That’s over half a million dollars altogether being paid for a service that is not being performed.
This is the kind of wasteful spending that has citizens irritated. I don’t think any of us mind paying for these sort of safety issues, but the government agencies MUST perform the work. Why pay for something that is not being done? As always, it is us citizens that lose out.
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August 13th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I’m way past irritated. But, it’s nice that someone else noticed how those masons try to control the spin. They sure are prophets.
August 13th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
another question could be WHERE does that money GO?? yeah.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Today’s Trib: City Makes Hydrants Priority
Everyone claims to be fiscally responsible when they run for office, but look at the shell game they’re playing with our money: The fire dept. pays the water dept. $40 per hydrant per year, and the city charges the county $60 per hydrant a year — for inspections that aren’t getting done.
Even when they do the work, they play a shell game with our money: the water dept. makes a little somethin’ off the fire dept., and the county pays the city an extra 50% markup. And we’re the suckers.
And now they’re having to react in a hurry, and finally perform the service we’ve been paying for all along, so:
August 14th, 2007 at 9:35 am
siphoning MILLIONS. And they just went in front of city council asking us to PAY THEM to come out to a wreck. So, I figure the next logical step is for them to start causing wrecks with old beater cars. MILLIONS !!
We CAN start over. Tampa was never ever THIS bad. This awfulness is unique to the past five or six years.
And, it’s VERY bad. No oversight whatsoever.
Except for a few of us.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Just plain neglect. Thanks to the Tribuned for doing a great job on this story - and for not letting up.
August 14th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
It seems like the only “inspections” being done were from the neighborhood dogs.