Dear Santa

Dear Santa,


I guess you are pretty busy with all the children's wish lists pouring in.
Before you read my wish list, please accept my apology for the outrageous lists from my own two kids. I've read them, and I don’t think it’s possible to fulfill their demands even for someone of your remarkable thrift and ingenuity.

Like the view government employees take toward their respective budgets, so my kids think that you are operating on a limitless set of funds. (By the way, if you are going to grant my son his wish for a pet alligator, would you please attach a return address so I can send it back. I don't want it to end up in lake Lewisville.)

But I know that your funds are not limitless, and so I hope you’ll accept my Christmas wish list as both a request and token of good will to all my fellow Corinth and Denton County residents.


1. Please make all the school boards, especially Lake Dallas ISD and Denton ISD, give back to all parents a voucher equal to what it now pays per-pupil for its public schools, allowing those parents to use those vouchers at any school they choose.
2. Please help DTCA with smooth implementation of the new rail system or as it’s also known, ”Denton County’s financial black hole “



3. Santa please send a wake up call to the tax payers: In the city of Corinth we have about 13,000 registered voters. Only about 600 show up to vote. Corinth city hall and the council do everything in their power to keep the turn out low. Help them to wake up and remember that local elections occur every May.


4. Please help the Mayor Ruggiere, councilman Mayfield, councilman Booher and Hanson, to understand that a civilized society's first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Taking $2,000 campaign contribution from Ben Penell and immediately voting to rezone a property so he can sell it within weeks for $800,000 it is not moral. To pay an extra $ 62,000 to exiting city manager in exchange for a gag order to protect the council members is not moral. To vote on a budget without seeing it it is not moral. To be a chest-pounding "Conservative" and then turn around and violate property rights of dozens of taxpayers on Church Dr, South Corinth St and Lake Sharon is not moral. To take down all council minutes and agendas prior to 2008 to prevent the taxpayers from following the council behavior and questionable activity is actually border line with braking the law.

5. Please help our tax payers to realize that City of Corinth will not have 28,500 population in 2014, Today we have about 19,750 and in August we added 3 new homes in Corinth.

Denton County will not have 970,000 population in 2014. Today we have about 657,000 and in 2010 we added about 17,000 new residents to the county.

Help the taxpayers realize that all the expansion and the associated debt  ignores the actual, on going, stagnation of Corinth and burdens a much smaller tax payer base to handle a larger proportion of debt!

Denton County and my little bedroom community of Corinth is now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people via inflated, imaginary needs while digging us the tax payers deeper and deeper in debt. They must not be allowed to near tax payers money.

It’s a tall order, Santa, but it’s important. I know that a man of your ingenuity and thrift can make it happen.

P.S. Would you please, on the way back north, take with you, City MGR Berzina, Justin Brown and couple other moochers...?

The Corinth Budget Workshop That Wasn't

“I have always believed that everyone engaged in a particular enterprise is charged with a degree of responsibility for nurturing the enterprise, as opposed to exploiting it.”

--Jack Bobo, National Underwriter Life & Health

I am critical of the city’s budgeting of our tax dollars. In fact, if there’s one issue you and I agree upon most, it’s that the City of Corinth needs to control city spending and rethink its entire fiscal policy. Because of our mutual concern for Corinth’s finances, I want to share with you my recent experience at Corinth’s July 29th budget workshop.

The workshop started at about 7:45 and ended at 10:20. In all, twenty-nine people were present:

- 21 City employees
- 5 council members (Mayfield was absent.)
- 2 citizens (myself included)
- and 1 reporter from the Denton Record Chronicle

All twenty-nine of us sat crowded inside a small room adjacent to the council chamber to listen to the city Mgr. Berzina presenting the budget. It was the city’s chance to lay out a sensible fiscal plan and silence their loudest critic.

There's just one problem. At no point during the City of Corinth’s Annual Budget Workshop did the city present a budget. No line item, no budget, no debit service, no serious discussion about fiscal policy just 13 power point slides.

Here’s what they did talk about:

• cut SPAN transit services for disabled veterans, chronically ill and the elderly
• cost-of-living salary increases for city employees
• ways the city can raise taxes
• a separate demand by the city manager to give city employees yet another salary increase

Our fears are confirmed. The city exploits the enterprise instead of nurturing it. Instead of strong leadership and good ideas, we get opportunists and meaningless PowerPoint presentations.

Let’s take a deeper look at the ideas presented during the workshop:

Bad Idea #1:
Cut SPAN transit services for veterans and the elderly

Special Programs for Aging Needs (SPAN) is a private, non-profit organization whose mission is to provide “outstanding services to older persons, persons with disabilities, veterans, and the general public, including nutrition, social services, transportation, and other services to enable people to live as fully and independently as possible.”

As of the 2006 census, 3.3% of Corinth’s population was 65 years of age or older, or roughly 650 elderly residents. That doesn't include people with special needs or our disabled veterans who may benefit from SPAN’s services.

Based on the usage data, presented at the meeting, for SPAN's services it is a widely used program by our community. The way I see it, until you've pared down every excess in your spending, don't cut support services for our community's elderly and disabled.

(Visit SPAN’s website to learn how your donation or volunteer hours can make a difference: http://www.span-transit.org/v2/about.html)

Bad Idea #2:
Raise Taxes (but by how much?)

Finance Director Lee Ann presented to the City Council and the rest of us in attendance nine power point slides, none of which contained any budgetary information. It did, however, contain six options to raise taxes.

From what I could tell, the purpose of exploring ways to raise taxes was to cover a budget shortfall and give all city employees a pay raise. The question is how much do you raise taxes?

This is a tough one. On the one hand you have your revenue, and on the other hand you have your expenses. Your expense needs to be bellow your income to be balanced. You can raise taxes to a level that generates revenue in excess of your expenses, cut expenses to a level that generates excess revenue, or both.

The correct option is both. Cut unnecessary expenses, re-evaluate your budget, and then develop a reasonable tax plan based on that budget. If the city Mgr. doesn't know how to do that bring someone that can..You don’t propose raising taxes simply because you’re faced with a shortfall or want a pay raise. That avoids fixing the underlying issue.

A budget shortfall can occur for a lot of reasons, but the most common reasons are failure to cut expenses on the budget, increasing debit and failure to stick to the budget. As I’ve said many times at council meetings, creating a budget is easy, but it takes strong leadership and oversight to stick to it.

Bad Ideas #3 & 4:
Cost-of-living salary increases and demands by
the City Manager for additional city employee pay raises

Pay raises and cost-of-living salary adjustments are not bad ideas in and of themselves, but they are bad ideas when put in the same context as raising taxes and terminating transit services for the elderly and disabled.

Compounding the issue is that the demands for pay raises came from City Manager Jim Berzina who costs us over $ 200,000 a year and whose pay has become a sensitive subject. At the end of the day, however, you don't need poor context or an overpaid city manager to tell you that giving raises to an overstaffed city hall is a bad idea.

Just look at the data.

Information gathered from Texas Workforce Commission and IRS forms filed by the City of Corinth show that the average pay per city employee increased from $47,392 in the 1st quarter of 2009 to $ 49,092 in 1st quarter of 2010.

That average doesn't include the $7,400 health coverage package per employee (regardless of position or salary), and it does not include retirement benefits or fully paid vacation and sick days. The city employee receives $ 59,750 average pay. The average income for an individual Corinth resident is $ 36,500.

In the wake of higher pay for city employees, Denton County struggles with the highest unemployment rates in recent history, not to mention the lingering effects of the mortgage crisis. Property values declined, business scaled back because that's what happens in a down economy. Private companies downsize its workforce by at least 25%, cut pay, furlough, reducing work hours and benefits.

The City of Corinth, however, wants pay raises. It wants to tax and spend and further burden its citizens with debt. It's like Vanya Cohen said, "When there's a single thief, it's robbery. When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation." Whatever angle you want to take that one from, be my guest, but make no mistake that until a budget is made available to the public, it's robbery.

Still waiting for that budget...

But we don't have to wait for good ideas. Already I talked about cleaning house and approving a budget instead of cutting services to the elderly and the disabled, before taxing an already economically battered community, and before giving all of city hall a pay raise. Did I miss anything?

I'll take it a step further and offer the following plan:

As of today we have 158 employees, 35 with the police department and 41 with the Fire department. We need to seperate our first respondants then I propose that the remaining 82 employees receive an immediate 15% cut in pay. It's not personal. It's business. Just a thought.

What are your ideas?

When Bitten, Bite Back

Once Bitten, Bite Back

How did we get into this economic mess?
Consumers like you and me got ahead of ourselves over the past 10 years and spent money that we didn't have on things we didn’t need. We ran up balances on credit cards and treated our houses as ATMs by continually borrowing against them. It was easy, popular, and nothing could slow us down – nothing except economic collapse, of course.
To be fair, some of us were more prudent than others, but by and large, I think we can all agree that the above paragraph illustrates a fair deal of the practices that got us where we are today. But rather than continue, we learned from our mistakes. We, as citizens, heard the message loud and clear: scale down, hang on to your job, and be happy.

Now we’re driving our cars for seven years instead of buying a newer or bigger car every two years. We no longer carry balances on our credit cards if use them at all. We’re planning to stay put in our houses for longer periods of time and learning to be happy with it. We do this because we know that consumer demand for bigger houses or large credit card debt will not return to pre-crisis levels. Consumers aren’t spending like it is 1999, 2003, 2006, or 2005 - not even like it’s 2008. The nonchalant approach to debt is over! Reality hit us hard, and it taught us hard lessons.

However, our Local Government and City Council didn’t get the same message.
They’ve learned no lessons from the economic crisis and continue about their poor fiscal governance like it is business as usual. Surely the mayor and council have a good reason for ignoring reality. Right? After all, it’s their unique inhuman like ability to see into the future that they were elected into office....
Maybe they see growth occurring in Corinth where other parts of North Texas have seen sharp decline and contraction. According to Corinth’s Capital Improvement Plan published in 2005 and prepared by an engineering firm that subsequently receives a large number of our capital improvement projects, the Corinth population is expected to grow by 10,000 residents in the next year to 28,000 residents!

Folks, that is a ridiculous projection touted by our City Hall to justify the unnecessary scope of their improvement projects and an overstaffed city hall. Corinth lost 1,500 residents since 2008, issuing only 3 housing permits in 2009 and likely will issue zero permits in 2010 after the new home buyer’s tax credit expires and mortgage interest rates increase after July of this year.

City Hall tells us things will go back to normal, that we’ve only hit a little snag. Reality tells us they are wrong, and the basis for their claims tells us they are, at best, delusional. Only one thing for certain has returned to normal for our city – the mayor, city council, and city manager continue to tax and spend. City of Corinth has approximately 13,000 registered voters. Unfortunately, in the last ten years, only between 400 and 750 voters turned out at the polls. The fact that we have an apathetic community should not empower the bureaucrats at city hall and slick council members to take advantage of the tax payers.
Meanwhile, they whistle past the graveyard and hope nothing bites them.

Friends, I urge you to bite! We will bite. It is a promise!

Bad, bad Corinth City hall and a bigger debt!

My Friends,

In light of the work ahead of us in the year 2010, let’s take a walk down memory lane and recount what transpired in 2009.

- No external, independent, financial audit of City Hall’s budget or spending and buying was conducted and made public as is required by Corinth’s Home Rule Charter in the last 5 years. As a result, we’re asking Mayor Ruggierre and anyone on the council responsible for this oversight to resign.

- In the absence of the above mentioned audit no rational spending decisions made and it was a "closed" process.

- Mayor Burgess left the mayor’s office but left us with plenty of unanswered questions...

- Criminal complaint was filed with the DA against City hall and city council.

- Remember Churchgate? We bravely fought together in opposition to the City Council’s deceptive practices and misuse of our tax dollars. We collected over 480 petition signatures and exposed the fact that city council had been taken over by a small clique of architects, commercial developers and local politicians. The city ignored the petition and the residents wishes and the project was built.

- In 2009 we've achieved a record number of, four out of five, city councilman that are occupying there seats by just placing their names on the ballot and running unopposed or filling of a vacant seat. What is that telling you?

- Our City population lost around 800 residents and dipped under 19,000 forwards the end of the year. Less Tax payers in the city, more debt acuired. These figures are opposite the huge growth City Hall predicted to support their growing staff and expensive projects. Absent free choice, public input and fair representation, the 2006 Capital Improvement Plan, the document on which those phony growth numbers are founded, become only the excuse for the public works department's and CEDC existence.

- After we found inconsistencies and blatant fabrications to the Council agendas and minutes on the City's website, all of the 05-06-07-08 years records were purged from our city’s website. What are they trying to hide?

- City Hall and City Council actively engaged in destruction of existing Corinth Businesses. Ask me how.

- Not a single ordinance that improved our lifestyle or saved us tax money was passed by the City Council. That is third year in a row!

- What would possess a city manager, who is supposed to oversee essential city services, to venture into the road building industry? City hall has one of the fastest-growing staffs in town when the number of employees should have declined as the city was built out and the population shrinks. Instead of scaling back, Berzina and company is building an empire by turning City Hall into a pseudo-hub of unjustified road construction with programs too numerous to name and honest contracts too few to count. Hello, City Council, Mayor, where are you..?

Let’s face it, Corinth City Hall has evolved into a machine for dispensing pensions, benefits, and lining the pockets of architectural and law firms who manufactured the very base and the main justification to all of this insane expansion. Because of the economy, many Corinth residents have had to scale back their spending and make sacrifices. Meanwhile, City Hall continues to grow in size (overstaffed by more than 30 employees) and spends money like it grows on trees!

Let’s work together in 2010 to make the necessary cutbacks in our City of Corinth government spending and staff size. Let’s start by finding the culprits behind the bogus Capital Improvement Plan projections and save the rest of our community from the same fate as our neighbors on Church Drive.



Sim Portnoy
Citizens of Corinth for Transparency and Accountability

Criminal Complaint filed with the DA aginst City Hall and Cit Council.

My Friends,

After repeated requests, from most of you, we went ahead and filed the following complaint with the DA's office. Some of you don't like to open PDF attachments so for your convenience you can read the complaint as an e-mail text bellow.
We have the " Exhibits" only in a PDF format. In case you want to see any of the attachment please e-mail us and we will send you the requested attachments right away.


Sim Portnoy
1623 Falcon Dr
Corinth, TX 75006
November 11, 2009
The Honorable Paul Johnson
Criminal District Attorney
Denton County
1450 E. Mc Kinney, Suite 3100
Denton, TX 76209-4524

Dear Mr. Johnson:

I am writing to ask you to protect the residents of the City of Corinth from the Corinth City Council and City Hall. I am coming forth and asking you to determine if “Official misconduct” per TEX. LOC. GOV’T CODE:

“Official misconduct” means intentional, unlawful behavior relating to official duties by an officer entrusted with the administration of justice or the execution of law. The term includes an intentional or corrupt failure, refusal, or neglect of an officer to perform a duty imposed on the officer by law.

, “Oath of Office,” per City of Corinth Home Rule Charter ARTICLE VII 7.06, “Failure to Forfeit and Vacate” per City of Corinth Home Rule Charter ARTICLE III 3.04 A.2. violations where committed or and if the DA finds additional violations. Can retroactive and immediate Cure or Remedies be applied based on the following facts and information:

A. For Fiscal years 2008 and 2009 the Corinth City Council failed to direct an independent audit of all city accounts by a certified public accountant as required. (See Attached Exhibit A, Page 20, Section 9.12):

B. The city council entered into an engagement with a Rutledge Crain & Company, PC CPA firm, in years 2005-2007 to conduct independent audits in clear violation of Section 9.12 of the Corinth Home Rule Charter by stipulating in the contract that the independent audits for 2005 through 2007 were for city staff use only and not for public record (See Attached Exhibit B, Page 8, last paragraph).

C. Failed to satisfy generally accepted accounting standards of municipal fiscal management and failed to comply with the requirements of the Texas Local Government Code (TLGC), Title 4, Subtitle A, Chapter 103, Sections 103.0001, 103.002, & 103.003 (See Attached Exhibit “C”)

D. For the past five years, current and past city councilman exhibited Substantial Noncompliance with City of Corinth Home Rule Charter section 9: “Municipal Finance” and Section III “The City Council”, Subsection 3.04 A.2. “Forfeitures and Vacancies” (See Exhibit A, Page 5):

1. Failing to hold a meeting and vote to have an independent audit.
2. Failing to publish such audit.
3. Failure to make financial audits, transactions, budgets, and performance audits available for examination by the taxpayers.

Question: Do the above-mentioned violations A – D constitute “Official Misconduct”,
“Oath of Office” according to their definitions, and therefore is the city council subject to the “Vacate of office” provision? What are the proper remedies to “cure” these violations of the Corinth Home Rule, Section 9.12 (See Exhibit A)

E. City council also violated City Ordinance No. 05-04-07-10 Code of Ethics, Section 5: Enforcement, Subsection E, in failing to create the Corinth Ethics Committee and/or Advisory Board since 2005 even when the non-compliance was brought to their attention. See Exhibit “D,” page 6

Question: Does the above-mentioned violation in item E constitute “Official Misconduct”, “Oath of Office,” and therefore is the city council subject to the Vacate of office provision? What is the proper remedy to “cure” this City Ordinance violation?

In addition to Home Rule Charter violations, we respectfully request the honorable District Attorney’s office to investigate the following:

(1) The Corinth City council voted in a secret meeting to pay resigning City manager Clovia English $ 72,322 above her deserved $120,000 separation package in return she signed a "Gag" agreement. We believe that this agreement between Ms. English and the City of Corinth did not serve the city resident’s best interests; instead, it transferred the consequences of council’s questionable behavior to the taxpayers. In conversations with council members Mayfield and Bryan, they defended the agreement as the initial employment agreement between English and the city. Please see the attached entering Employment agreement, (Exhibit “ F”), exiting Separation agreement (Exhibit “ G”), and an article from Denton Record Chronicle written by Peggy Heinkle-Wolfe dated May 1, 2008 (Exhibit “H”).

Did the Corinth City Council violate the powers granted to them by the Corinth Home Rule Charter under Article II, Sec. 2.01, “K” (Exhibit A, page 2) and commit “Official Misconduct” and violate their oath of office?

(2) I, Sim Portnoy, on Feb, 4th 2009 requested the volunteer application (Exhibit “E”) and mayoral approval letter for P&Z committee member Jay Ross. At the time of my 2-4-2009 public information request, I was told the city did not have either of the requested documents. I requested that the city put in writing that they did not have them. City Secretary Kim Pence and City Manager Jim Berzina refused to provide me such a letter.

(3) On April 3, 2008 city council voted in favor of a mysterious “donation” (Exhibit “K”) of $474,000 from the CEDC to the City of Corinth for the for the rehabilitation of a little known , city owned building, Woods Community Center. The project was halted at a later date when the city was caught re-categorizing Sales Tax Revenue as the above-mentioned “donation”. The project was not halted before runoff and drainage surveys were conducted at an approximate cost of $66,500. We suspect the above-mentioned drainage study was shared with the potential buyers of an adjacent tract, Ashton Gardens, & developers Vaughn Andrus to help increase the property value at the expense of the taxpayers.

Did the city council misuse public funds by providing tax money for engineering services to a private entity?


(4)Minutes, including high importance instrumental documents that assisted City Council’s vote taken on April 17, 2008 to grant Gateway Development $135,000 disappeared from the CEDC minutes. The city posted revised minutes on the city website (See Exhibit I). The revision came after citizens questioned granting $135,000 to Gateway Development. I could not find any subsequent vote for the revised minutes approving the removal of said documents. Fortunately, I captured the entire document before its removal. (See Exhibit “J”)

Did the Corinth Economic Development Committee and City Council commit “Official Misconduct” by revising approved minutes and removing instrumental documents without a vote?


(5)In June, 2008 I ordered a “Call Information Report” from the Corinth Police Department that contained all police activity between November 1, 2008 and May 25, 2009. After going through the report and summing up all types of criminal activity and responses by the CPD, I noticed that the weekly crime reporting page in the local newspaper “The Lake Cities Sun” makes no mention of any of these activities. However, there were very detailed crime histories for Hickory Creek, Lake Dallas , and Oak. I brought this disparity to the attention of CPD Chief Bradley during a phone conversation in August, 2009. She informed me that she had the same concern and she addressed it with the Lake Cities Sun editor where he responded to her that he was directed to edit the weekly crime report for the City of Corinth. Lake Cities Sun is the official newspaper for the City of Corinth, and the city spends about $20,000 with the newspaper annually.

Is the removal of crime data from the Lake Cities Sun’s crime report page for the City of Corinth a violation of law, contract, or an unethical practice otherwise cured by the powers of the District Attorney’s Office?


Sincerely,
Sim Portnoy

Citizens of Corinth for Transparency and Accountability

PORTNOY APPLAUDS COUNCIL ACTION ON ETHICS REFORM

September 18, 2016

Today, the Corinth City Council approved the ethics reform proposal allowing the newly-appointed Ethics Committee to impose civil fines for ethics code violations. Under the current ethics reform ordinance, the Ethics Committee may only send a letter asking a violator to stop the unethical behavior.

Councilman Portnoy, who helped draft the new proposal, applauded his fellow council members for voting in favor of the reform.

“The ethics reform ordinance passed today promotes appropriate guidelines to deter unethical behavior, behaviors that until this day have had no formal consequence and that have deteriorated the public trust,” said Portnoy.

He added, “Before City government can tackle the major issues of the city's growing debt, high tax rates and non-existent school district, we need a basic foundation of public trust. This proposal is a step in restoring that trust.”

But don’t get too excited, my friends. The above account is entirely fictional. I mean, since when was I elected to city council, and since when does Corinth have an ethics committee? We do not have one which is interesting because an ordinance was approved April 7, 2005 that requires council to appoint an ethics committee every two years, but four years later we still do not have one.

To find out why we have no ethics committee, please call Mayor Ruggiere at 940-498-0948 or you can email him at http://www.blogger.com/pruggiere@cityofcorinth.com%20 .

If I had attended the South Corinth Street meeting, I would have said...

Many planners, architects, politicians still dress all variety of manipulations up as 'Town Hall Meetings', 'participation in the process', 'citizen consultation' and other shades of dishonesty.

At last night's Town Hall meeting, it was the Public Works Director and the engineering firm who educated, persuaded, and advised us citizens, not the reverse. Curent hostile city council and city staff legitimized the manipulative agenda by emphasizing the terms "information-gathering," public relations," "Citizens Input and "support" as the explicit function of last night's Town Hall Meeting.

So If I had attended last night's meeting, I would have said....

The citizens of Corinth are gathered tonight, called to this public meeting by the city, to share our thoughts on the plans to reconstruct South Corinth Street, but let me preface my comments about the plans to reconstruct South Corinth Street by telling you what I know about citizen participation in public meetings.

At meetings such as this we can be certain of one thing: The city planners, the mayor, city council, city manager, and our public works director will disguise their attempts to manipulate the public. They have already done it by calling us here to get our input when we know with a hundred percent certainty our input will have minimal affect on the outcome of the process.

Their real objective is not to facilitate citizen participation in the planning or construction process, but to enable power holders to "educate" or "cure" the participants, to engineer their support. And then, when the project is approved and construction begins, the city can dismiss public outcry by saying they had a public meeting where citizens were given due consideration.

Tonight you will be told that the reconstruction of South Corinth is necessary, but it is not. The residents of Church Street were told their street’s reconstruction was necessary, but indeed, it is not. Both capital improvement projects are based on faulty assumptions about growth in Corinth and in the case of Church Street, the firm responsible for making those projections is the same firm we subsequently awarded the design contract to, which in all has cost us 3.2 million dollars. Clearly that is a conflict of interest.

The people of Amity Village should request a brick wall be placed between their homes and the new road, cutting off their residential streets from cut-through traffic and blocking noise from both the highway and the new thoroughfare that South Corinth and Lake Sharon will be when all the capital improvement projects are complete. The residents affected by the reconstruction of South Corinth Street should ask to see a traffic study, a tree protection and mitigation plan, and should be reasonably sure that the city’s selection of a firm to design and construct the project is not a conflict of interest.

Tonight the city will present the plans for South Corinth as favorably as they can. They may even make promises or agree to concessions in design. I urge everyone here tonight to get in writing whatever promises or concessions to which the city agrees.

Let me repeat, whatever the city promises you, demand to see it in writing. The residents along Church Street wished they had done the same, so this advice comes by the wisdom of those who are now suffering at the hands of the city’s relentless pursuit to waste our tax dollars, ruin our property values, and destroy our quality of life in Corinth.

The city’s website proudly boasts that Corinth is a “Gateway to Success.” A gateway, my friends. Corinth is an opening that you pass through to get somewhere else? That is how our city officials, our mayor and council, our city manager – That is how they see us, unworthy of being a destination.

And that is why they push to build thoroughfares through our neighborhoods. Just look at the images below to see what you have to look forward to when the city decides that your neighborhood is the next victim.

You remember Church Drive, don't you?

Never Look a Gift Racehorse in the Mouth

by Councilman Dong (Place 8)

Often times I’m overcome with a sudden low and vibratory chortle that escalates into a full blown bout of laughter. If I’m lucky, I am alone when it happens, but if that’s not the case, I feel obliged to explain my uncontrollable outburst to those who witness it. People who don’t know me, of course, will nod reassuringly as I tell them about my prolonged exposure to mustard gas during the War of 1812 or about a gene singular to my royal Egyptian blood line. My friends, however, know that I’m a compulsive liar and could care less when or why I laugh.

But I laugh nonetheless. I laugh at the long, hot summer days in Texas. I laugh because I don’t know why. I laugh because something is funny, I guess, which reminds me that I need to call Bram and ask him about a pillow. He and I were in his office last week laughing about some technicality preventing him from building on his property, and I said something to the effect that he could build whatever he liked provided that his papers were in order. I really stressed the word papers, as in paper money, and winked when I said it, and it was funny because it was unnecessary. We both knew he’d pay me when the time was right.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. A commercial developer like Bram doesn’t approach a city council member and say that he’d like to pay him for certain favors. It’s more subtle. A guy like Bram will have one of his employees tell you it’s a shame that the infrastructure isn’t in place to construct a Town Center at 3467 Rocky Road, a twenty acre tract of land situated in the E.C. Moran Survey, etc. The next thing you know, it’s being suggested by the shadows that you own a stake in the leasing mechanism for said development or, and this is my personal favorite, the shadowy visage of Bram gives you twenty thousand dollars in exchange for certain capital improvements. Maybe “subtlety” isn’t the right word, after all.

In fact, the whole plan is the exact opposite of subtle unless me and the rest of the council can subtly plunge the city 64 million dollars into debt, subtly rezone large tracts of land from residential to commercial, subtly cut down thousands of majestic trees, subtly widen sleepy residential streets to three and four times their current width, subtly hand out lucrative design contracts to the same firms that draft the projections and assumptions for future capital improvements, subtly violate the law by not recording our executive sessions, and last but not least, subtly ignore the protests and petitions of an outraged public.

I feel that low and vibratory chortle coming on. Maybe it’s because Bram isn’t picking up the phone. I need to ask him what it means that I can’t sleep well at night. Didn’t he mention a kind of pillow that conforms to your head and helps you sleep? What was the name of that pillow? I could use a pillow like that. I was thinking about it as I walked along Rocky Road today with yellow ribbon in my pocket. Not real ribbon, mind you. It was imaginary ribbon that I was imaginarily tying to trees that extended beyond my imaginary measuring tape where I had, in my imagination, decided the edge of the road we’re building for Bram would be located. Yes, the road is real. We just haven’t built it yet.

I admit to feeling some shame that all of those trees will come down to make way for Bram’s road, but it’s the price of progress. People are the price of progress, too, but you can’t take down people. You can pay them, or lie to them, or both. Sometimes you don’t even have to pay them, but you always have to lie because the truth will never have the right appeal. Can you imagine telling a concerned citizen that you could care less about them so long as Bram gets his Town Center? No, it’s hard enough keeping a straight face when voting on matters in open session. No need to add truth-telling to the burden.

Besides, concerned citizens are a pain in the ass. They clamor with their petitions and nasty emails and comments during the council meetings, and it’s all so tedious and annoying. They say we’re hiding the truth when the truth is that most people support the council’s construction plans. Not one of the twelve-thousand, six-hundred, and eighty-seven residents who participated in the imaginary survey that I conducted on my thirty minute lunch break the other day opposed the Rocky Road project, well, except for my neighbor, but he’s a real jerk. Really, that’s not my imagination. He’s a Class A jerk.

But dealing with the jerks and their silly visions is just part of a council member’s job. I imagine if the jerks’ vision for our city were realized, then we’d have sustainable, neighborhood-friendly development that generated adequate tax revenues while complimenting the citizens’ lifestyles, but I don’t know if complimenting lifestyles is what Bram has in mind, so I can’t comment. As a politician, I’m always not commenting on something that might cast my commercial developer friends in a bad light.

Okay, I must sleep now. I’ve been lying in bed for hours, and it just occurred to me that Bram isn’t answering his phone because it’s three in the morning. I’ll send him a bouquet of flowers tomorrow expressing my sincere apologies for calling at this hour. Maybe if I had a space foam pillow I’d be asleep already, or if I could resist looking a gift racehorse in the mouth, or if those pesky jerks could be felled like trees. You know, forget the flowers. I’ll get someone in public works to recommend a huge sanitary sewer project that services Bram’s property. He’ll like that because I bet a lot of pooping goes on at a Town Center.

Maybe that’s right – maybe it’s called a space foam pillow. I really need to ask Bram about that. It’s my number one priority.

Save Church or Why We Can't Trust City Hall

In the last three years, I have attended approximately 27 council meetings. Of those 27 meetings, when something came up for vote, not once did I ever witness a debate amongst the mayor and council. Why is that? It’s because they make their decisions behind closed doors, in secrecy, and whether it is me or you or everyone in Corinth pleading our case for or against an agenda item, they have already decided how to vote. So, it is fair to say that I, like many others, have walked away from these meetings with a sense of violation.

It leaves me with more questions than answers.

Questions like:

- Why did we pay an exiting city manager $ 62,000, on top of $ 120,000, in exchange for her silence?

- Why didn’t Ruggierre abstain from voting on the Medical Center property owned by Ben Pinnell when his vote was clearly a conflict of interest in light of the fact that Pinnell contributed money to Ruggierre’s campaign and the vote was to rezone Pinnell’s property so that Pinnell, which he did shortly after the vote, could sell it for $800,000 to a developer?

- Why did the mayor and council take a casual, hands-off approach to an incident involving 3 Corinth police officers tazering a child? The city’s lack of action resulted in a federal law suit that we are involved in right now.

- Why is the council running us into a budgetary deficit of 2.1 million as of today and 3.8 million by the end of the fiscal year?

-How involved was exiting mayor Vic Burgess with the sale of the Ashton Gardens property at the corner of Post Oak and I-35?

And many more unanswered questions.

Now all of the above questions may have perfectly good explanations, but the city isn’t sharing those explanations. They are not accountable to you and me. They do as they please when it pleases them, and we suffer for it. Like I said, it’s enough to make you feel violated.

And it’s that sense of violation that troubles us now as we wait for the city to tear down 600 mature trees along Church Drive only to plant 30 saplings in their place and sink 2.4M of our tax money, which they will do with no explanation as to why it is necessary.

Our only shot at holding them accountable is to continue collecting signatures, and more importantly, to attend the city council meetings. We had 47 people attend the last one on May 21st, and 20 of those who attended spoke to city council to stop them from voting on the paving bid for the Church Drive reconstruction.

What we need this week is for everyone to attend the council meeting. Bring your friends, your family, your neighbors, your coworkers. We need you there to show your support for the Save Church effort. The council meeting is Thursday, June 4^th at 7pm at the Corinth City Hall located at 3300 Corinth Parkway. Please email me at citizensofcorinth@yahoo.com and let me know if you will attend. I need an approximate count. We also need you to print, sign the petition and collect as many signatures as you can for the next couple of weeks. You can turn in your petitions to Brad Eubanks at 2614 Church Drive. You can find a printable petition at the following web address: http://sites.google.com/site/corinthchurchdrive/ The petition is a pdf attachment below the "Home" information.

Thanks to everyone who has helped us. I encourage you to email me any suggestions or concerns you have about how the city conducts business. I also encourage you to comment below any concerns or insight you have about the questions I have asked above.

Who we are and what we want..

Lets agree on some core issues:

The City of Corinth is a Bedroom community. As such, we seek the following fundamental rights:

A) We want our community, the citizens, our kids, our elderly and our property to be safe and secure.

B) We want our real estate property value to increase.

C) We want our tax money to be safe-guarded and spent wisely in a way that primarily benefits our community.


If we can establish that the above core principles are common ground for all the citizens of Corinth and for you, the reader, then let’s honestly look at how those core principles have been applied by our local government.

First, lets go back in time to May 21, 2009, to the last city council meeting. We had record-breaking attendance, a total of 47 citizens attended in hopes of saving Church Street and our tax dollars, On top of that, we had CBS news coverage. (http://cbs11tv.com/video/?id=42437@ktvt.dayport.com)

What was the big fuss? Just a little stretch of country road with pot holes named Church Street. That night the city voted to uproot 575 old trees and to continue with their plan to sink 2.4 million of bond money into the project without any traffic study or earnest public deliberation.

The city's vote in favor of the project was in violation of core principles A, B, and C.

The general consensus among the citizens who attended was that the council had made their decision to approve the paving bid before open session began. We the citizens have no access to whatever formal or informal meetings occur between council members even though it appears the real decisions to spend our tax dollars and dictate policy take place in those meetings, not in open session.

To add insult to injury, council member Joe Harrisson justified his vote on an unofficial survey of 91 residents that he conducted. He said that most were in favor of the "improvements" to Church, but not one of those residents attended the meeting to confirm Joe's story. Joe's "unofficial survey" is just another attempt to undermine open discussion about issues that affect our well-being and safety.

It’s frustrating. And the Save Church effort is just the tip of the iceberg. Core Principles A, B, and C are systematically ignored by our mayor and city council. Look at the medical center across from City Hall. Look at the commercial development at Post Oak and I-35. Look at our city’s budget deficit. Look at the 6-figure salaries we pay people to ignore and betray us. Frustrating.

If there is a chance to save Church, then we will take that chance. But regardless of the outcome, this struggle to uphold the core principles stated above will serve as a reminder that our officials have contrived, deliberately and shamefully, to operate in a vacuum of secrecy and against our community interests.

"Save Church" made the 6 o'clock news

My Friends,

What a great success. The Save Church campaign made the CBS 6 o’clock news on Tuesday.

I beg you to watch the CBS News video at the link posted at the bottom and form your own opinion, but first I have to say a few things about comments made by the City Manager, Mr. Berzina.

City Manager Berzina asks if we want a road with potholes. Well, my friends, the answer to that question is no. Does Mr. Berzina believe that our only options are to wipe out the trees or have potholes? He poses the question in a way that suggests there is no in-between. Very tricky, Mr. Berzina.

Mr. Berzina also boasts that because of the bad economy, the project will cost only 2.4 million dollars instead of 3 million. The only problem is that whether it costs 3 million or 2.4 million, the project as it is planned today is unnecessary. In that respect, 2.4 million is not a very good deal at all. If it’s a good deal Mr. Berzina wants, I have an F-16 I can sell to him at half-cost. What? Mr. Berzina doesn’t need an F-16 Fighting Falcon? But he’d be getting such a great deal!

Listen, folks. The last thing the Corinth officials needs to boast about is how thrifty they are. Don’t they know that we’re 5 million dollars in the red because of their thriftiness?

It’s hard to admit you’re wrong. And to the council and newly-elected mayor’s credit, this project has been tossed around and had so many hands in it, that it’s fair to say they never intended for it to go this far. The trick now is to appeal to their sense of community, to their obligation to serve the public, and most important of all, to appeal to their common sense because the current plans to widen Church defy common sense.

We need to ask them why we need the project.

Was a traffic study ever conducted?

What about North Haven and Wildwood and the traffic conditions created there when Church is a welcome invitation to cut through residential streets to get to the highway?

Why did Don Locke promise us the trees would be saved, and why did council later recant on that promise?

All sarcasm and nasty rhetoric aside, the latest Save Church campaign is very simple. We need to convince the council that it’s okay this one time that they have already wasted our money. We need to look past the money spent and look toward what we’re getting if we move forward with the widening of Church. The outlook is grim and irreversible – that’s why we have to convince city council to take a step back, take a deep breath, and do the right thing.

To see the news video, copy and past the link below in your address bar:

http://cbs11tv.com/video/?id=42327@ktvt.dayport.com


Sim Portnoy
Citizens of Corinth for Transparency and Accountability

An update on the Save Church effort

Fox News, CBS 11, WB 33 News, and NBC 5 have been notified of the “Save Church” effort and have tentatively committed to cover the May 21st council meeting at city hall. The people in the newsrooms that I spoke with were interested in our effort to preserve the natural and historical integrity of Church Drive. If you don't know what I mean by natural integrity, then watch the video below to find out. Be sure to continue reading below the video.



Having the media present makes your attendance more critical than ever. Join us at the council meeting on Thursday, May 21st at 7p.m. to show your support for othe Save Church campaign.


Remember, we support a sidewalk along the north side of Church Drive. We support the repaving of Church Drive, possibly widening it by a few feet. But we do not support the city’s plan to destroy all 500 plus trees.


We contend that ample space is present to construct a sidewalk on the north side of Church Drive without destroying the tree canopy. We contend that the benefit of keeping the trees, most of which are over 50 years-old, far outweighs the benefit of a widened road as currently planned by the city.


Once Church is destroyed, we can’t bring it back. Join us in our cause for common sense in local government. Join us in our effort to save Church. Once again you can help us by attending the Corinth city council meeting on May 21, 2009 at 7pm in the city council chambers located at 3300 Corinth Parkway in Corinth. For more information, email me at citizensofcorinth@yahoo.com.

Save Church.

Church Drive is one of Corinth’s last remaining treasures. It is an aesthetically pleasing, tree-canopied street under attack by city council. All of the trees along Church Drive will be cut down, and mitigation of those trees will do nothing to restore it to its original beauty.

In the beginning, the council assured us that some of the trees would be saved. On April 28^th, they recanted and told us that all 500 of the trees would be destroyed.

But this issue is not about trees. It’s about aesthetics and the quality of life we as citizens of Corinth want for ourselves and our children. This is about the historical relevance of a street that the city’s founders travelled to attend church services in the early years of Corinth’s township. This is about the unnecessary expenditure of our tax dollars.

This is not a hoax or an exaggeration. Church Drive and other city treasures will disappear if we fail to act. We must let city council know that we will not allow our city to be homogenized for the sake of convenience in design and construction.

The city’s governance of this matter borders on criminal neglect. Help us stop them before they make another huge mistake.

The next city council meeting is on May 21^st, 2009 at 7 p.m. Council meetings are held at city hall located at 3300 Corinth Parkway. Your attendance is vital. Please attend this meeting and sign up to voice your concerns. For more information, please email us at citizensofcorinth@yahoo.com.

Congratulations.

Citizens of Corinth for Transparency and Accountability want to congratulate Mr. Paul Ruggiere on his win in the mayoral race!

We also want to congratulate the Citizens of Corinth on record turnout, about 790 voters!

We are in trouble..

Let me throw some facts at you:



Corinth Population about 19,500

Based on Denton county election commission:

11,500 registered voters

1,800 unverified registered voters.

Together it is 13,300 voters.



In the last mayoral elections, May 2007, the previous mayor was elected with 556 votes, Place 2 Jim Mayfield with 343 votes and at the time Place 5 Shanon Bryan with 506 Votes.



So far as of last Friday after two days of early elections 95 people showed up to vote !



This election will be decided by a hand full of votes and we need you to be counted.



We need to be honest with each other and realise that a low voter turnout across the city is a disaster due to the fact that the next two years are detrimental to the future of our property values, safety and security and cost of living in this city!

We cannot show that little interest in exercising this fundamental right to vote.

WE NEED ALL CITIZENS TO VOTE OR START TALKING TO FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS IMMEDIATELY!

CITY OF CORINTH NEEDS THE VOTES!

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD.

Corinth's future hangs in the balance....

Dear Friends,

Do you feel we should allow Corinth City Council to represent outside real estate developers or political groups that conflict with public interests?

Do you feel we should allow the City Hall and the City Council to be opaque, under-handed, and not held accountable for their actions?

Do you feel we should allow our city to fall deeper in to debt?

Or do you feel we should fight against the corruption and personal agendas that constitute the basis for our current city council’s actions?

Isn’t it time that the Corinth City Council act on our behalf as advocates for citizen security, increased property values through responsible development, and the safeguarding of our tax dollars?

If you answered “yes” to the last two questions, then your support is needed right away.

There is an upcoming election for Corinth City Mayor and City Council. The two Mayoral candidates are Shanon O'Brien and Paul Ruggierre.

- Paul Ruggiere received $ 2,000 election contribution from a commercial real estate developer and a land owner in April 2006. On the day he was elected and sworn in, Ruggiere voted for rezoning of the land that the contributor personally owned and made him $ 800,000 richer. By doing so, Ruggierre decreased all of the adjacent residential properties values.

- Paul Ruggiere repeatedly voted for any expenses and increase of taxes and for City's failed budget. We are now 5 million dollars in the red!

- I’ve personally had dealings with Paul Ruggiere. I've brought to his attention that several police officers tazered a 14 year old kid under terrible circumstances. I've also informed him that an autistic child was assaulted in a Corinth park. He ignored these allegations, and in the instance of the tazered child, his failure to act has led to a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the city.

- Paul Ruggiere voted to pay $ 62,000 to an exiting city Manager in return for a Gag Order against her. What kind of information did she have about his corrupt dealings that he would want to keep her quiet? And why should you and I pay for that?

- Paul Ruggiere believes that Corinth citizens who speak at their own city hall are merely “guest speakers” and as such their comments do not require publishing in the council meeting’s minutes. This means that you and I can complain to the city during a city council meeting and those complaints will not be recorded. We have this position in writing issued to us by the city attorney. Paul Ruggierre backs this position, illustrating his hostility toward the public.

- Paul Ruggiere repeatedly violated our Home Rule Charter and refused to vacate his seat.

Please go to the polls today and vote for what is right! Please talk to your friends and family and take them to the polls. This election transcends party lines. This is about what’s good for the all citizens of Corinth. Please help us keep Ruggierre out of the Mayoral seat!

Sim Portnoy

Citizens of Corinth for Transparency and Accountability