City of Weatherford Utilities

It occurred to me again this morning as I prepared our trash for pickup that our local utility dept. ROCKS.

I've lived in the same house my entire life, and for that period have been served by the city.

Electric outages are very, very rare and when they do happen they're fixed lightning-fast. Water has been generally good, except for occasional turbidity which they are now working to eliminate. Trash pickup is so regular you could almost set your clock by it (no, really).

I have always considered the amount charged to be an absolute bargain. So for a couple of months this year the bills were higher due to things totally out of the city's control:

1) ERCOT tried to rape the city with an unannounced and unexpected 7-figure bill for congestion charges

2) Natural gas was at an all-time high

3) It was summer, when bills are highest anyway

This trifecta of awfulness meant that for a couple of months the bills were high(er). But really, how high is high?

My normal summer bill was about $275 or so. This year I hit $330. Whoop-de-doo. I speak to friends who live in Dallas or Tarrant counties, and their bills are stunning. $330 as a high point for electric, water, wastewater, and trash all rolled together? I'll take that any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Now the winter bills are back down in the sub-$100 range. Folks, that's an incredible value.

Now, if I could just get them to start putting the lines underground like God intended...

As a side note, it's too bad Jennifer Fadden had to get the blame for the electric issue. She was a very good manager and completely not to blame. There was no justification whatsoever for her gracious resignation offer being accepted. She was allowed to be a scapegoat for the folks who were reluctant to stand up and face the heat head-on. 'Nuff said.

More Road Silliness

So as I waited (and waited, and waited) for the non-timed traffic lights on Fort Worth Highway this morning, I recalled why it was a few years ago that our speed limits were curtailed. Emissions non-attainment!

So, here we are, years later, still in non-attainment status, and not one functioning brain cell at TxDOT has thought that "gee, we should time these traffic lights so we don't have thousands upon thousands of vehicles sitting and spewing crud in the air for no good reason all day, every day". Efficiency of a vehicle at a traffic light? 0%. Number of vehicles in Parker Co. pointlessly waiting for unnecessary traffic lights because TxDOT won't time them? Lord only knows.

I also passed construction going on to put in the permanent traffic lights at I-20 and FM1187. Fantastic - goodness knows we need a replacement set of traffic lights for that hopelessly overloaded interchange. That's much better than, say, extra capacity, or clovers, or just about anything except a stupid waste of money to do the same job twice.

Oh, and look! It's the mind-bogglingly ridiculous neck-down of I-30 between Spur 580 and I-820. Three lanes on one side, three lanes on the other side, and two lanes in between. Could someone with an 8th-grade physics education please explain to TxDOT why no road will ever move faster than the slowest choke point? Be sure to include the prime example of the gloriously widened Santa Fe Drive in Weatherford that goes down to ONE lane each way at I-20. This guarantees a backup all the way over the hill and back down toward Holland Lake. The reason I was given by past local TxDOT engineer Jimmey Bodiford? "I didn't know how to design the bridge at I-20, so I didn't".

Is it time to reform TxDOT yet?

Courthouse Square

The City of Weatherford has gotten a lot of flak over the redesign work on the courthouse square. From the traffic flow to the parking spots to the protective walls to the sidewalks, there have been 10,001 complaints.

This isn't one of them. I think it looks fabulous.

I know that this will forever doom any aspirations of making it onto Virginia Scott's Christmas card list, but I think it's a giant leap forward. Pleasant vegetation, buried utilities, clearly-defined pedestrian pathways, lighting, handicapped accessibility, and the list goes on. I love the aesthetics. I love that the new traffic directions mean that endless jackasses can't cut the roundabout at mach 1 through Weatherford National Bank's parking area. I love that the walls mean pedestrians are more-or-less forced to cross at crosswalks instead of the mindless wandering across any handy road surface I've seen.

I've lived my whole life 3 blocks away, and I can't ever remember a time when it looked (or worked) better. I'd love to see this as the seed that sprouts through the Central Business District and beyond.

TxDOT, Legislature, and a Sea of Brake Lights

Lordy, where to begin?

The roads in our area, by and large, are awful - under-maintained and woefully inadequate. I remember when our highways were the envy of the nation (and that's not an exaggeration). Somewhere along the line things have gone horribly amok. I really blame two different entities for the overall problem. 

TxDOT - in my opinion hands-down the worst-managed major state agency we have. Political and belligerent, it's locked in a my-bleep-is-bigger-than-yours power struggle with the Legislature. It honest-to-goodness seems like they're making decisions that will cause horrendous consequences for the motoring public in order to strongarm the Legislature into additional funding (can you say 199 frontage roads?). At this point I'm for tearing the entire upper management layer off and trying again. The folks responsible for the piteous state of our once-magnificent TDHPT should be banished, never again to feed from the public trough. At least their replacements will hopefully not goof by $1,100,000,000.00.

But far and away the worst offender here is the Texas Legislature (with a nod toward the Governor as well, who appoints the committee members). It is their job to oversee and fund public transportation infrastructure. They are doing neither task sufficiently. There's plenty of time to monkey around with utterly stupid and inconsequential tripe like acceptable levels of cheerleader sluttiness, but not enough to get a handle on one of the core functions of government? Let's by all means spend days and days of valuable biennial calendar real estate arguing about how/where/when/if to kick Tom Craddick out of the speakership, but not devote the time to take some authoritative and significant action on a problem that is costing our economy gazillions.

Our local Rep. Phil King and State Senator Craig Estes are good men, and in my opinion doing a great job overall. With that said, they are usually so involved in other (larger?) issues that Parker Co. and the cities within it have been left completely out on their own when it comes to adequate roads (both in capacity and quality). Neither has shown any discernible leadership related to getting our road situation under control, nor seemingly even a grasp of how serious the situation is becoming.

We have drilling rigs almost on top of each other, yet the county cannot fix the roads as fast as the frac drivers are just utterly shredding them. The state receives money for all this energy activity, of which approximately $0 is returned to the county to fix up the mind-numbing quantity of stuff these inexperienced drivers are tearing up (roadbeds, courthouse lawn, curbs, shoulders, retaining walls, fences, etc.). How is that reasonable?

Even better, the state's effective rate caps mean that it doesn't matter if we have a bazillion jillion dollars of minerals getting extracted, the county can't exceed an annual 2.9% real dollar increase without being subject to rollback. That's a great protection as long as you live in a vacuum. We need additional capacity and the wherewithal to fix what we already have as we're getting buried alive under energy-production traffic. The mineral and surface estates need to be divorced as far as the effective rate cap is concerned. 

Parker Co. local taxpayers (and in fairness all the Barnett shale counties) are basically taking it squarely on the chin. We get to pay 100% of the upkeep on overloaded and destroyed roads while the tax revenues, fees, and so forth go elsewhere. That makes the state budget dreamy, but is 100% suckage for the local taxpayer.

I'm thrilled that we have just approved an $80M transportation bond to begin work on some of our terrible problem spots, and for which there aren't enough kudos in the world for County Judge Mark Riley and the Commissioners Court, but frankly this is just a complete and utter failure on behalf of our state representation and TxDOT. I hate to say stuff like that, but facts are facts. I steadfastly believe it's their job to see to stuff like this, and they have been thoroughly ineffective at accomplishing it.

I'm simply terrified of trying to talk to Phil or Craig about the issue, because I'm so upset about it that I'm afraid I'd end up letting them have it with both barrels, and they need a friendly prod, not a ball-peen hammer (figuratively speaking). It's the same reason I won't call TxDOT's local office and ask why the @#$! traffic lights can't be sequenced in my lifetime.

Ahhh, I feel better now. I'm ready to go park on South Main street.

Let's get underway, shall we?

My name is Brad Felmey. I live in a great little town west of Fort Worth, Texas called Weatherford. I'm active in my community, married, and can't seem to ever shut my brain off. This can be somewhat of a curse.

It is my opinion that I need a dumping ground for these random thoughts. Some will be kudos, some will be rants, all will be a release. It's my hope that by having this place to deposit my mental diarrhea I can keep from unloading upon the poor, hapless souls who are the causative agents and deserving recipients.

If I'm lucky, nobody will ever read this blog. If I'm really, really lucky the people who need to see what I write will read it.

Nah..... never happen.