Conway's Mayor Tab Townsell lied again to the public when discussing the reasons for the nearly
40% increase in sanitation fees.Townsell mismanaged the city of Conway's budget to a point that it
suffered a $1.9 million shortfall in its cash reserves.
Desperate for cash, Mayor Tab Townsell and other city council members including David Grimes, Shelley Mehl, Mary Smith, and Shelia Whitmore (whose office terms end December 2014) raided the Sanitation Department cash funds to balance the city's checkbook.
Note: The Sanitation Department has always acted responsibly with its budget to have this much money in its account for equipment needs and expansion needs for the landfill.
Needing to shore up the
account deficit at the Sanitation Department now
created by the Conway City Council members, Mayor Townsell and council members devised a plan to
raise the sanitation fees nearly 40% in order to reimburse the shortfall that they created in the Sanitation Department. Townsell and Sanitation Director Cheryl Harrington went before the public and declared that the Sanitation Department needed this rate increase for aging equipment when in reality it needed money due to the mismanagement of city finances by Townsell and council members.
Director Cheryl Harrington stated, "Garbage Trucks need to be replaced every 5 years", quote from the Log Cabin Democrat. However, according to recent statistics from the American Recycler- garbage trucks on average are replaced after 12 years and expenses are falling due to municipalities converting their trucks to natural gas which Conway is implementing. In other words,
THERE WAS NO NEED TO INCREASE SANITATION FEES!!!
Mayor Tab Townsell's patterns of lies and deceptions finally reached epic proportions and were exposed when reading an excerpt from the Faulkner County Business Journal...........
http://faulknercountybusinessjournal.com/node/121
From the article you can see that the needs of the Sanitation Department have already been met from the 1/8 cent portion of the Rededication of the 1/4 cent sales tax and Townsell specifically stated that there would be
"NO NEW TAXES".
As more and more people retrace the statements made by Townsell, they will recognize that Mayor Tab Townsell may go down in history as the "Biggest Liar in Faulkner County Politics", maybe even surpassing Guy "Mutt" Jones!!!
(Note: As the taxpayers and ratepayers were being gouged by Tab Townsell and Cheryl Harrington, Townsell and Harrington gave themselves a hefty pay increase with Tab Townsell's salary increasing 30% to $102,339 and Cheryl Harrington's salary increasing 20% to $79,337. It looks like Townsell and Harrington are more concerned with lining their own pockets than keeping more money in the pockets of the citizens of Conway.)
Sources:
Faulkner County Business Journal
American Recycler
Debra Hale-Shelton of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Joe Lamb- Log Cabin Democrat
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