Local tax and spend officials fail to extort State; private sector comes through

A better headline for this story would be: “Local tax and spend officials fail to extort State; private sector comes through” read a message I received from a listener. The story was in the Lubbock mudslide and headlined “Lubbock’s most visible dump is finally getting cleaned up.”

It’s all about a failed “recycling” center just north of Lubbock on I-27 that frankly is not particularly noticeable unless one is looking for it or works nearby but for years the site has vexed officials for serious as well as shallow reasons.

Lubbock citizens may remember that both city and county officials have passed toothless resolutions begging legislators to make state taxpayers to pay for Lubbock’s local mess pile. In March, Lubbock’s egotistical mayor, Dan Pope, and a few others held a press conference at the site to pressure legislators to get colleagues to go along with forcing state taxpayers to pay for the clean-up of Lubbock’s local mess.

Pope & his Leftwing slogan in re-elect bid

Pope and crew, despite an inflated view of themselves, were unsuccessful in getting the Legislature to fork over money to clean up the small site. It’s one of the many reasons Pope’s group bears such antipathy toward state Reps. Frullo and Burrows who don’t share city hall’s conviction that Texans elsewhere should pay for Lubbock’s minor problems.

Turns out that private investors, who already owns and work a landfill and waste business very near the site, were able to buy the property at low cost at a tax auction and are cleaning it up leaving them with a nicely located bit of commercially property to develop.

My listener was pithy in writing: “What a revelation that a private company thinks it can do the clean up at a lower cost than the local governments whose biggest effort was “hosting a news conference near the piles of trash.”